Getting your students’ writing skills up to par can be challenging and overwhelming. First, there is the task of constructing assessments that accurately measure writing proficiency.  Then you have the huge job of analyzing the results and seeing how they line up with the standards for each individual student.

And to make things even more complicated, not every struggling writer is alike. Each of them are confronted with a different set of challenges. Some struggle with expressing their ideas fluently; others can express their ideas well but need some support in basic grammar and punctuation. It can be very time-consuming, as well as labor-intensive, to sift through individual student responses and tease out measures of proficiency along an array of different standards. Each student needs different supports, but determining exactly which ones are needed for each student can absorb a huge portion of a teacher’s time and attention.

But fortunately, the Lumos Learning Coherence Map makes this intensive process much more intuitive for teachers. You can see at a glance how each student measures up on each individual writing standard. You have access to a variety of graphs and metrics that immediately reveal your students’ overall progress as well as more precise details about the types of questions with which they struggle the most.

Quick, easy and accurate assessments

When your students complete a writing assessment, simply click “Grade Them Now” on the red banner that appears in your dashboard.

This brings you directly to each student’s individual written responses, allowing you to see immediately which questions each student answered correctly or incorrectly.

When you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will find an exact breakdown of the numbers of grammar and spelling errors, as well as a readability rating, for each student on each question.

This makes it possible for you to get an immediate glimpse of areas of concern for each individual student.

For even more information, just click on “Detailed Report” next to the breakdown of errors. This provides a clear visual of how each student performed on that question, and the the kind of errors that he or she is making.

Metrics

The “Write Metrics” tab on the sidebar provides tools to easily get a deeper understanding of what your struggling writers need in order to become proficient.

Choosing “Overview” from the menu brings you to a chart with information about numbers of grammar and spelling errors, unique words, and sentence length.

You can choose to view this information about individual students, or the whole class.

This gives you information you can use right away. If some students have a high number of grammar and spelling errors, you can then look for resources that specifically address grammar and spelling. If students are writing short sentences with very few unique words, this is a signal to you that something else is going on, and other interventions are needed.

If the school year is well under way and you’ve been providing targeted interventions to your struggling writers for a while, it might be helpful to take a look at the Progress tab on the sidebar menu.

This gives you an immediate assessment of how the student is progressing along measures of spelling, grammar, sentence length, and unique words. You can immediately see whether a student is showing improvement as a result of your intervention, or if she or he needs another approach.

If you want to see how your class as a whole is progressing in response to a particular lesson or assessment, you can instantly generate that information by choosing Lesson Insights on the menu.

As you can see, there are multiple charts and visuals to help you quickly discern which students are struggling the most with writing, and what interventions would be helpful.

Once you have identified the areas in which your student writers struggle, it’s easy to find resources specifically targeted to their needs. You can then assign more practice, yielding results that give you even more information about how these students are progressing and what they still might need.

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