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Harding Students Demonstrate Growth as Writers

This year at Harding we have continued our commitment to improve student writing across the curriculum.  In addition to the content area courses, students have focused on developing their writing skills to reflect, develop critical thinking skills, and to learn new information within Advisory.   This habit of writing, which began by keeping a writer’s notebook, is the first step to our success as writers.   In addition, students have been given three opportunities this school year to write a one-paragraph response to a prompt, which was scored by the entire Harding staff on a 6-point rubric, modeled after the state of Minnesota’s rubric for the GRAD test in Writing.  Our prompts included the following:

• October: Life as a teenager can be challenging.  Describe a challenge you have faced as a teenager.

• January: Everyone has hopes and dreams for themselves, their family, or the world in which they live.  Describe one of your hopes or dreams.

• March: Some people believe that experience is the greatest teacher.  Describe an important lesson that you have learned from an experience you have had during your life.

We set our building-wide writing goal as follows:  By the end of the 2008-2009 school year, 30% of all students will have improved their score by at least one point on our 6-point rubric.  It is important to note that during the 2007-2008 school year, approximately 24% of our students improved their score by one or more points.

We are pleased to report that, as of today, 43% of all students who responded to two or three of the prompts have improved their score by at least one point.  These are encouraging results.  The very deliberate and concerted efforts from the students and staff at Harding are responsible for this success.  We intend to persist in our efforts to improve the quality of every student’s writing skills.  We acknowledge the expanding demands on literacy skills for our children as we move forward in the 21^st century.   We are poised and ready to meet those challenges.