NoRedInk Writing Benchmarks provide administrators with powerful tools to monitor student progress toward mastery of standards-aligned writing skills! These benchmarks also deliver valuable data that enables teachers to make meaningful and informed instructional decisions throughout the academic year. If your instructional team has decided to implement NoRedInk Writing Benchmarks, check out the resources below to learn more about implementing this tool!
💡 Looking to incorporate our Grading Assistant in your Writing Benchmarks? Check out this article to learn about our Grading Assistant-powered Writing Benchmarks!
Creating a Writing Benchmark
❗ The ability to create Benchmarks requires access to our Admin Tools. Check out this article to learn how to gain administrator access in NoRedInk!
Once you've decided that Writing Benchmarks are aligned with your school or district's educational goals for the year, you'll need to decide whether you want to use Unscaffolded Quick Writes or Scaffolded Guided Essays/Short Response assignments. Quick Writes serve multiple purposes, from building writing fluency to assessing content understanding, while Guided Essays and Short Response assignments provide scaffolding and exemplars, allowing teachers to focus on individualized instruction.
The Writing Benchmark created will be assigned to the schools and grade level chosen during setup, and teachers will begin seeing a notification 3 weeks before the administration window opens. For step-by-step instructions on creating your Writing Benchmark, you can check out this article!
Administration Best Practices
Looking for ways to ensure smooth implementation, maximize student participation, and generate meaningful data? This article provides comprehensive guidance for school leaders implementing NoRedInk Writing Benchmarks. In this article, you'll find implementation advice for the entire benchmark process, including:
- Pre-administration preparation
- Administration monitoring
- Accessing results
Grade Norming and Its Importance
Reliable data to inform instruction across classrooms requires that teachers hold a common understanding of the rubric and how to apply it to student writing. To ensure your teachers are aligned on the grading norm for the administration process, check out our article on grade norming with Writing Benchmarks!
Reviewing Benchmark Data
When it comes to reviewing Writing Benchmark data as an administrator, you can drill down results by:
- School
- Teacher
- Rubric item
- Overall student performance
To ensure you and your teachers can use this data meaningfully to inform instruction, we recommend taking the following steps:
- Target Skills Practice - Use results to identify areas for focused practice within the practice engine
- Promote Writing Conferences - Encourage teachers to discuss benchmark results with students through one-on-one conferences
- Leverage Student Portfolios - Help students understand how their writing portfolios demonstrate growth over time
- Consider Context - Remember that benchmarks are a snapshot of the current state of students' writing abilities
- Review Trends - Schedule a consultation with your Customer Success Manager to analyze high-level patterns (ensure all benchmarks are fully graded before this step)
- Schedule professional development: Plan dedicated training sessions for teachers on how to utilize benchmark results to inform instruction.
- Time your professional development strategically: Conduct PD between mid-September and mid-October, after administering the Benchmark.
This ensures your benchmark data becomes a meaningful tool for instructional planning! These steps can help teachers interpret and translate data insights into targeted interventions and instructional adjustments that support student writing development throughout the year.
Supporting Teachers
Some of the most common mistakes we see administrators making during this phase of Benchmark implementation are related to setting expectations and follow-through. To ensure your teachers and students are set up for success during the Benchmark administration process, check out our article on supporting teachers during a Writing Benchmark!
Measuring Progress
The final step in this process is to schedule and administer a follow-up Benchmark if you have not already. This process will be similar to the steps outlined above:
- Create and schedule a follow-up Benchmark that directly aligns with the Benchmark administered earlier in the year (same rubric, genre, etc.).
- Share Benchmark directions, expectations, and links with teachers (again, we recommend a 2-week administration window).
- Schedule time with your Customer Success Manager to review high-level trends.
- Lastly, it could be vital for future Benchmarks to capture additional feedback from teachers regarding the process. What went well? What could help this process run smoothly in the future?
💡 One piece of feedback we've received is having NoRedInk embedded into pacing guides helped teachers prioritize what content to teach during each semester.