RESULTS

The first day of the NEMP writing assessment (Day One – 5 minutes) involved students thinking and planning. A black and white video was shown to set the focus for the concept of ‘special places’. Its intention was to encourage the students to think about places that were special to them. After viewing the video, the students were asked to plan their ideas, noting down their thoughts but not to start writing.

Themes: Most students planned to write about their immediate or home environment i.e. what they knew best or were familiar with. Given that the writing was to be ‘true, not make-believe’, this was possibly inevitable. Forty-five percent of year 4 students planned to write about their own room or house, compared with 37% of year 8 students. Nearly 40% of year 8 students planned to write about a combination of special places, while 26% of the year 4 sample used a combination of places in their planning. In both year groups, the other topics were all under 10%. They ranged from 6% (leisure) to 3% (relative or friend’s house and holidays) at year 4, and 8% (outdoors) to 1% (relative or friend’s house) at year 8.

Planning Strategy: The vast majority of students at both levels employed some form of strategy in the planning stage. There was only slightly less evidence of some form of strategy used at year 4 (95%) than at year 8 (99%).

Table 4: Percentage of students using a planning strategy by year group

 

On the second day (Day Two – 20 minutes) the students were asked to write for twenty minutes about their special place, using the planning from Day One. The instructions clearly stated that the writing was to be true, not ‘make-believe’. Hence, it was implied that they were to use their own first-hand experiences and knowledge of a special location for their writing.

Evidence of planning on Day Two: A high degree of planning was evident on Day Two, with 89% of year 4 and 98% of year 8 students showing some or substantial planning in their writing.

Table 6: Percentage of students’ use of planning evident on Day Two by year group

Amount of writing: Year 8 students wrote almost twice as much as year 4 students. The number of words written by year 4 students ranged from 25 words to 283 words, with a mean of 111 words. Year 8 students on the other hand wrote between 49 to 476 words, with a mean of 218 words.

Evidence of Proofing: In their Day Two writing 76% of year 8 students compared to 57% of year 4 students showed some evidence of proofing as they wrote on Day 2. Twenty-four percent of year 8 students and 43% of year 4 students showed no evidence of proofing their work.

Keeping to the Topic: Year 8 students were more consistent in keeping to their topic (88%). The remaining 12% kept partially to the topic and none wrote entirely off the topic. The year 4 students’ writing was less focused, with 72% keeping to their topic, 7% partially on topic, and the remaining 21% not keeping to their topic.

Table 7: Percentage of students keeping to the topic by year group

Relationship between planning and writing themes: Fifty-eight percent of the year 4 students wrote about their own room/home. The other topics were all under 10% of the sample, ranging from 1% who wrote about the NEMP video to 10% who used a combination of themes. The spread of themes was more varied at year 8. Forty-six percent wrote about their home environment. The spread of other topics was from 2% (school) to 16% (outdoors).

As Table 9 illustrates, there was some divergence at both year 4 and year 8, from what had been planned. Although 39% of year 4 students planned to write about their own house and environs, 52% actually wrote about this theme. Twenty-six percent of year 4 students planned to write about a combination of themes, but only ten percent actually completed this. The biggest change with year 8 students was also with the combination of themes; although 40% planned, only 10% completed writing about a combination of themes. It is possible that students used their planning day to canvas a range of ideas from which one was chosen for writing about on the subsequent day.

Table 9: Relationship between planning and writing (percent by year group)

The third day (Day Three – 10 minutes) was for the students to take time to check their work and make changes or improvements. A dictionary was supplied.

Spelling: All spelling mistakes and student corrections were noted and then counted to achieve the figures presented below. A detailed analysis of spelling records from the task could be a worthwhile extension to this study.

Table 10: Average number of spelling errors and corrections by year group

A combination of the amount of writing completed, the mistake tally and professional judgement was used to code punctuation usage. ‘Appropriate’ generally had less than 10 mistakes and displayed a sound understanding of punctuation; ‘satisfactory’ had between 10 and 20 mistakes and a basic understanding; and ‘poor’ over 20 mistakes and weak or little understanding of punctuation usage.

Sentence Structure: This section of the study highlighted that there was considerable scope for teaching the basics of sentence structure at both levels. The art of ‘building a sentence’ correctly appears to have been lost, or never learnt, by more than half the children assessed.

Both simple and compound sentences were analysed using the following descriptions:

…some sentences are short and simple; others are long and involved. Both have their special uses, and we should be wise to practice the use of both in our writing. (Bradbury, 1954, p 7)

In a short simple sentence, the proper order of the words usually presents little difficulty. A long sentence, however, made up of many phrases and clauses, may easily become loose and clumsy in structure if care is not taken to arrange its various parts in the best way. (Bradbury, 1954, p 42)

As the table 12 below shows, at year 4 level, 68% of the students were able to construct simple sentences satisfactorily, but 32% showed a poor understanding of a simple sentence. However, by year 8, 81% of students were able to demonstrate either appropriate or satisfactory usage of simple sentences.

Table 12: Student use of simple sentences (percent by year group)

Although just over half the year 4 students demonstrated a satisfactory use of compound sentences, just 8% were able to use compound sentences appropriately. At the year 8 level, 44% showed adequate usage, but 28% demonstrated that they were able to use a more complex sentence structure appropriately.

Table 13: Student use of compound sentences (percent by year group)

Sentence Length: There was a low percentage of appropriate sentence length at both levels, with only 13% of year 4, and 30% of year 8 students mastering this. Excessive sentence length was linked closely with non-sentence usage. A general lack of understanding of basic sentence structure was shown by the high percentage of students using inappropriate, and usually lengthy sentences and non-sentences.

Table 15: Student use of sentence length (percent by year group)

Do children recognize correct sentence structure? If they do, these results also indicate a lack of proofing for sense (reading over their work to see if it ‘sounds right’). The study has highlighted a need for sentence structure to be taught, understood and modelled at all levels.

Proofing for Sense: Initially, this section was coded globally under the headings of nil, some and substantial evidence of proofing for sense. It was found that almost all students proofed for global sense with 93% in year 4 and 95% in year 8.

Table 16: Student use of proofing for sense (percent by year group)

However, it quickly became apparent that three types of proofing were being utilized – sense, spelling and punctuation – and that it was necessary to note which was being used in each script (sometimes one, two or all).

At year 4, 25% of the sample proofed for sense, 85% for spelling and 32% for punctuation. At year 8, 52% of the sample proofed for sense, 72% for spelling and 54% for punctuation.

Spelling was the most common, and possibly the easiest, proofing mechanism used at both levels.