What is a Writing Benchmark and why is it important?
Writing Benchmarks are district-assigned Quick Writes or Guided Essays. Quick Writes can be used to serve a range of purposes, from building writing fluency and developing specific writing skills to assessing understanding of course content. Guided Essays support students with scaffolding, exemplars, and tips as they write, freeing up time for you to provide more individualized instruction.
Writing benchmarks are easy-to-implement, standards-aligned, and customizable benchmarks that:
- Track student progress against internal goals and state standards.
- Highlight areas for timely intervention.
- Facilitate real-time curriculum adjustments.
- Expedite remediation with a single platform for both benchmarking and intervention.
- Armed with this knowledge, you can iterate on the best guidance, practice, and teaching styles to accommodate the student's needs.
Administration Best Practices
While teachers are often familiar with using benchmarks to measure student growth, there are a few best practices the NoRedInk has seen teachers employ that help the process run smoothly.
- Find the time. Typically, administrators create a 3-5 week window for the benchmark to be administered. Plan to administer your benchmark early in the window so students who are absent can make it up before the window closes.
- Create NoRedInk accounts before completing the benchmark. Having students first activity within a program be a benchmark may not be the most enjoyable experience. Before you administer your benchmark, have students log in and update their interests. Additionally, consider assigning a Just for Fun or Back-to-School Quick Write to help students get comfortable with the site.
- Set expectations with students.
Be mindful of the preset rubric items and naming conventions in the assignment; those fields must remain unchanged in order to provide your district class-level data.
Assign a Writing Benchmark
When your administrator has created a Writing Benchmark, you'll see an Assign your Benchmarks banner at the top of your Dashboard. The Assignment Library will also display a banner when there are Benchmarks available to assign.
Admins have the capability to rename the term "Benchmark." Your school-assigned writing assignment may be called a different name.
- Click Assign now
- On the next page, you'll see the following information:
- The prompts and sources for writing
- The minimum length
- The grading framework chosen for the benchmark
- The grading rubric
- The estimated time it should take students to complete
- Click the Continue button to continue
- You can also click the Preview button to preview the assignment in the Student View.
- On the final page, you'll select which classes and students will receive the Benchmark, the start/due date, and the due time
- Click Assign
If you don't assign the recommended Benchmark by the due date, you will be unable to access it. Reach out to your admin for an extension.
Grading a Writing Benchmark
Writing benchmarks are district-assigned Quick Writes or Guided Essays so you'll grade your Writing Benchmarks the same way you grade other writing assignments in NoRedInk.
Grading an Unscaffolded Quick Write Benchmark
An unscaffolded quick write can be graded with a percentage score or based on a rubric. Your school administrators determine the grading method.
-
Assign a 0-100% grade
After a student submits their writing, you'll be able to enter a grade between 0-100%. You can also leave the assignment ungraded if the only feedback you want to provide is through comments. -
Grade on a rubric
After a student submits their writing, you'll be able to grade on the rubric set up by your administrators. You can also leave the assignment ungraded if the only feedback you want to provide is through comments.
Learn more about Grading a Quick Write here!
Grading a Scaffolded Guided Essay Benchmark
Viewing students drafts
- To see a particular student's writing, click the student's name (or the "Grade" button for any students with submitted drafts) from the class progress page.
- You can see a student's most recently saved writing from this page, so you can monitor students' progress as they work on their drafts
Giving feedback on students' drafts
- On this same page, once the student has submitted his or her draft, you can choose to either post a grade or return the draft to the student for revision (essentially unsubmitting the student's writing).
- Rubric score: You can assign a score along the grading rubric, which is identical to the rubric students see when writing. At this time, you cannot edit the grading rubric after you have created the assignment.
- Rubric comments: You can give specific feedback to each criterion outlined in the rubric.
- Overall grade: Based on your rubric scores, we calculate an overall percentage grade (and the corresponding points, based on the total point value of the assignment you chose when creating the Guided Essay). You can manually override and assign a different overall grade by clicking the pencil icon. (However, if you change any rubric item scores, it will recalculate the overall grade percentage.)
- Inline comments: You can highlight the student's writing and leave feedback directly on the highlighted portion.
- General comments: You can leave additional comments to share qualitative feedback on the overall draft by clicking "Add additional comments" below the rubric.
Once you've given qualitative or quantitative feedback, select Post grade and comments. You can learn more in this article about grading Guided Essays!
Reviewing Results
Before you start grading your students' submissions, it's often helpful to have a rubric norming session with your department to ensure that you and your team have a common understanding of students' criteria for success.
To capture data for your next steps, you'll need to grade your students' writing submissions. Be sure to leave adequate time to review student writing. While it might be tempting to leave each student individualized feedback, our goal here is to spot high-level trends.
- To keep this manageable, try to move efficiently through your rubric. You'll be able to give students more personalized feedback after we've identified our key focus areas for future units.
- We recommend tracking how students did on each criterion using the system that works best for you.
When reviewing benchmark results, you may want to consider the following questions:
- Which rubric items are students struggling with most?
- How does student proficiency impact how I'll need to prioritize these skills in upcoming units?
- Is there anything else I need to know about students' proficiency in these areas?
- How might I use this data to differentiate instruction for my students?
Teachers often plan their first unit to be a concept that students already have a basic understanding of as a way to help build confidence in their writing abilities.
Tracking Student Growth
Ideally, you'll assign and grade at least 2 Guided Essays between your first and second Guided Essay Benchmarks as a way of supporting students' growth in grammar, conventions, and writing skills.
In between Guided Essay assignments, we recommend:
- Assign regular skills practice by providing targeted practice on high-needs skills.
- Then, ask students to apply those skills in their own writing.
- As you identify high-need gaps from Benchmark data, you can pre-teach the skill and assign Practice topics to help students improve.
- From there, students can transfer their skills into their own writing in a skill-building Quick Write.
| What is it? | Who is it assigned to? | How long does it take? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assignment 1 | Pre-teach | Whole Class or Differentiated | 10-20 minutes |
| Assignment 2 | Practice | Whole Class or Differentiated | 30-60 minutes |
| Assignment 3 | Skill-building Quick Write | Whole Class or Differentiated | 15-20 minutes |
If this unit example feels right for you, use Modules as a way to quickly find and assign concept-based units.
At least twice during the year, you should assign more robust assignments to capture students' progress toward crafting a full essay.
- Students start by planning their essays using one of our graphic organizers.
- After students outline their thoughts, they draft a section of their essays with the support of targeted tips in a Guided Essay.
- Based on student results, provide Practice to help students develop high-priority skills.
- Finally, students revisit their initial Guided Essay, apply relevant feedback, and resubmit.
| What is it? | Who is it assigned to? | How long does it take? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assignment 1 | Graphic Organizer | Whole Class | 20-30 minutes |
| Assignment 2 | Guided Essay | Whole Class | 40-60 minutes |
| Assignment 3 | Practice | Differentiated | 30-60 minutes |
| Assignment 4 | Guided Essay | Whole Class | 20-40 minutes |
If this unit example feels right for you, use Standards & Tests as a way to find and assign standards-aligned content.