Early Grade Writing Assessment: An Instrument Model

Abstract

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization promoted the creation of a model instrument for individual assessment of students' foundational writing skills in the Spanish language that was based on a literature review and existing writing tools and assessments. The purpose of the Early Grade Writing Assessment (EGWA) is to document learners' basic writing skills, mapped in composing units of increasing complexity to communicate meaning. Validation and standardization of EGWA was conducted in the Canary Islands (Spain) in 12 schools using a cross-sectional design with a sample of 1,653 Spanish-speaking students in Grades 1 through 3. The author describes EGWA's internal structure, along with the prevalence of learning disabilities (LD) in transcription and developmental differences in writing between Spanish-speaking children with LD and typical peers. Findings suggest that EGWA's psychometric characteristics are satisfactory, and its internal structure can be attributed to four factors responsible for a high percentage of the variance. The odds ratio indicated that 2 Spanish-speaking children with LD in transcription are identified out of every 100. A comparison between students with and without LD in transcription revealed statistically significant differences concerning sentence and text production across grades. Results are interpreted within current theoretical accounts of writing models.

The Effects of Administration and Response Modes on Grade 1–2 Students’ Writing Performance

“…These findings suggest that although paper test mode was the optimal condition for both grades, this tendency was stronger in Grade 1 ELLs’ performance. It can be speculated that they may have been better accustomed to writing on paper in general (see Jiménez, , for a discussion of the positive correlation between writing literacy and grade levels in early writers).…”

Fluency and Accuracy in Alphabet Writing by Keyboarding: A Cross-Sectional Study in Spanish-Speaking Children With and Without Learning Disabilities

“…The children were assessed on EGWA and the Test Estandarizado para la Evaluación de la Escritura con Teclado ("Spanish Keyboarding Writing Test"; Jiménez, 2012); see also Jiménez (2016) and Jiménez et al (2016) for more information about both assessment batteries. The measures that were used for classification are the tasks that loaded significantly on the handwriting factor (letter production) and spelling factor (word production) obtained in the factor analysis of EGWA.…”

Handwriting Development in Spanish Children With and Without Learning Disabilities: A Graphonomic Approach

“…A total of four EGWA tasks were selected for this study: (a) writing the alphabet in order from memory, to verify if the student is able to reproduce all alphabet letters in the correct order from memory; (b) alphabet copying in manuscript and (c) alphabet copying in cursive, which are displayed if the student has acquired the motor patterns for writing letters in both cursive and manuscript; and (d) allograph selection, to see if the student is able to select an allograph (i.e., lowercase letter) for each capital letter (for a detailed description of each task, see Jiménez, 2016). These tasks were adapted from the original pen-and-paper EGWA format to the computerized Eye and Pen 2 software format (Alamargot, Chesnet, Dansac, & Ros, 2006).…”