At the beginning and end of the Capstone project, I gave my students an attitude survey. I asked my students to respond to the question "Do you like writing?" The representations above show how my nineteen students felt about writing at the beginning of my project and at the end. Each student is represented by a triangle. They were given the options I: always, almost always, sometimes, rarely, or never like writing. The data shows that my students' positive attitudes toward writing increased from the beginning to the end of the Capstone project.
In order to track growth, I gave my students a pre-assessment and a post-assessment. In both January and April, my students were given twenty minutes to write to the prompt: "Describe a time you were happy." They were then graded on sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. These were the traits that my students needed the most assistance with, and they were the traits that the class worked with over the course of the eight weeks. The students' assessments were graded by myself and my CADRE associate using the district's second grade narrative rubric. The rubric placed students on the following rankings: beginning, below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced. The graphs above show the students' growth. In all three areas, students showed growth.
Throughout the eight weeks of the project, my class focused on sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. Each week we focused on a different trait in mini lessons and writing conferences. At the end of the week, I collected the writing that my class had edited and completed. I assessed the work in all three categories each week. I scored the work every week using the district's rubric. In order to present this data, I looked at the number of students out of nineteen that were at or above grade level in sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. This would mean that the student would need to earn basic, proficient, or advanced. Through this process, I did see great growth and better growth than the pre- and post-assessments. I believe this is because the students had more time to work on the piece. They also had time to edit and revise. Additionally with each week, the students had the opportunity to conference with the teacher at least one time. The students' weekly writing pieces showed that they did better when they had a longer period of time to work on a piece and receive feedback.
