New Baseline Writing Assessments

The beginning of the school year is a great time to get an overview of students’ writing skills. This article will help you use our baseline essay-writing assessments to evaluate student writing and plan your instruction based on the results. 

💡 Grammar Diagnostics
Looking to assess students' grammar knowledge instead? Try one of our pre-made Planning Diagnostics.

Step 1: Choose the baseline writing assessment that’s right for your students

Our baseline writing assessments ask students to write a multi-paragraph persuasive or argumentative essay. The assessments include short, grade-appropriate readings that students can draw on to support their arguments.

Each assessment should take students roughly 2 hours to complete. You may want to start the assessment in class and then allow students to finish for homework.

We offer baseline writing assessments for the following grade levels (click any of the links to begin creating an assignment):

• Grade 5: persuasive essay with a single grade-appropriate text
• Grade 6: argumentative essay with four grade-appropriate texts; no counterargument
• Grades 7-8: argumentative essay with two grade-appropriate texts and counterargument paragraph
• Grades 9+: argumentative essay with three grade-appropriate texts and counterargument paragraph

Note: Because they’re meant to determine what students know before you’ve given any instruction, baseline assessments use our unscaffolded Quick Writes. This means students won’t see the tips and examples that they do when writing a Guided Draft.

Implementation Tips

• Personalize the assessment to use your own prompt and sources if you already have these in mind. Simply click into one of the assignments, replace the writing in the prompt field with your assignment, remove the sources below the prompt field, and (optionally) add your own sources. Learn more about adding prompts and sources.

• Share the assessment with your department to use as a common baseline. After creating your baseline assessment(s), you can send a link to your colleagues so that they can easily use the same assessment. Learn more about sharing assignments.

Step 2: Review the prompt and rubric

Each assignment begins with language that explains the purpose of a baseline assessment and then presents the task to students:

If you’d like, you can edit the prompt to add additional directions or scaffolds. For example, you may want to adjust the required number of body paragraphs or specify how many pieces of evidence students should include in each body paragraph.

After reviewing the prompt, familiarize yourself with the 3-point rubric on the right side. Hover over the question marks to reveal more detailed descriptions of each rubric item. Students will be able to see this rubric as they write.

💡 Instructional Idea
Before students write, preview the rubric for them and explain what specific skills you’ll be looking at in their writing.

Step 3: Score student responses

Read students’ essays and score them quickly using our 3-point rubric.

• A score of 3 means a student has mastered that element of essay writing.
• A score of 2 means a student shows partial understanding of that element of essay writing (needs to shore up some specific gaps in understanding).
• A score of 1 means a student shows no or limited understanding of that element of essay writing (needs to start from the basics).

As you score, keep a tally of which 2-3 rubric areas student seem to be struggling with most.

💡 Grades for Completion
Because a baseline assessment is more of a diagnostic than a test of learning, you may want to give credit simply for completion. After scoring with the rubric, you can manually override and assign a different grade by clicking the pencil icon. You’ll still be able to see students’ individual rubric scores in the assignment results.

Step 4: Use the results to inform instruction

Review the scores you’ve given to identify the most common trends. Then, use the table below to address these trends.

Tips

• Assign an activity from the table to your whole class on the area they struggled with most, prioritizing the skills at the top (thesis statements, evidence and argumentation, and organization).
• Select one activity from each of row of the table. Then, break students into groups based on what they struggled with most (or let students choose). Assign each group one of the activities. Learn more about assigning to specific students.
• Pick the top three areas that your class struggled with, and assign 1-2 of the activities in that row per week over the course of a quarter or semester. Then, assign a full Argumentative or Persuasive Guided Draft for students to apply what they have learned.

If students struggle with...	Consider assigning...
Writing clear, opinion-based thesis statements	Practice: Thesis Statements Skill-building Quick Writes: Developing an Opinion Comparing Facts and Opinions
Using strong evidence and argumentation to support their positions	Practice: Finding Evidence to Support a Claim Skill-building Quick Write: Using Evidence to Support a Claim A single body paragraph of an Argumentative or Persuasive Guided Draft (learn more)
Addressing counterclaims	Practice: Planning a Counterargument Paragraph Skill-building Quick Write: Developing Counterargument Paragraphs
Staying on topic and organizing ideas effectively	Practice: Topic Sentences Practice: Building a Paragraph with Transitions Skill-building Quick Writes: Writing Strong Claims to Support a Thesis  Using Transitions to Connect Ideas
Writing strong introductions	Practice: Selecting a Strong Hook An Argumentative or Persuasive Guided Draft with only the introduction paragraph required (learn more)
Writing strong conclusions	Practice: The Two Jobs of a Conclusion An Argumentative or Persuasive Guided Draft with only the conclusion paragraph required (learn more)
Conventions and style	Practice: one or more topics from our Commonly Confused Words pathways Practice: Sentences and Fragments Practice: Formal and Informal Language Skill-building Quick Writes: Correcting Fragments (Beginner) Correcting Run-ons (Beginner) Varying Sentence Length

Step 5: Later in the year, follow up with another writing assessment to measure growth

We’ll be releasing more writing assessments later this year. These will provide a way to measure your students’ writing progress at the end of a unit, semester, or year. In the meantime, you can always consider assigning another Quick Write using the same rubric we provided in these baseline assessments.