Sometimes more is really less
The item above comes from a sample item on the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) website, and it’s supposed to assess the writing of an argument (what used to be called persuasive writing). Click on the image to get a larger view to read the task.
I’m sharing this because this week I administered a similar writing task at my site recently. Students were given a sheet of facts and statistics, and a sheet of arguments for the two positions they had to choose from, to write a 5 paragraph essay.
When we were previewing the tasks, it seemed questionable to give students a list of “arguments” since this would make this a much lower-level cognitive task, and not require any analysis on the part of students. When you look at this type of task, you have to wonder why they would do things this way, and how they could insist that these tasks are at a “higher” cognitive level and more demanding than past writing prompts.
Of course, in the past writing was only assessed at a state level in 4th and 7th grade in California, and now we’re including it every year in tests. I know, I know, teachers in classrooms, and many sites, were doing summative writing assessments, but there’s a difference. Common Core