Simple ways to assess the writing skills of students with learning disabilities

Seize opportunities to create authentic writing tasks with your students.
Our students become better writers by writing frequently and willingly. In order for this to happen, we need to find ways to motivate our students to write at home and in school not just to fulfill an assignment, but because they crave the opportunity to connect and communicate with others.
One way to increase the frequency of students’ writing is to work with them to design tasks that make them want to share their message and persevere to get it right. Once our students are clear about what they want to work on, we can help them to grow.
When students are concerned with things like required length of a piece, requirements for mechanics, the number of sources required, and whether or not they need to write in complete sentences, we know they are not engaged in authentic writing. Rather than the teacher holding all of the answers, authentic tasks provide students with the chance to write for “experts” and those most personally invested in what they have to say. Students can make their own decisions about their writing and become an authority on their topic.
Embrace students’ questions.
When writing experiences are authentic, our students should be asking questions not for the purpose of identifying a “right” answer, but rather to gain feedback that will help them with future writing decisions. Some questions students may ask when the writing task is authentic are:

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  How will my audience respond to my ideas?
  
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  Is my evidence convincing?
  
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  Are the length and form appropriate for my audience?
  

Authenticity in Action in Our School
At Mendon Center Elementary School in Pittsford, New York, students were intrinsically motivated and highly engaged by the annual task of authoring and illustrating a class book for Scholastic’s annual Kids Are Authors competition. What made this competition so motivating for students was that if the class won, their book would be published by Scholastic and sold at book fairs around the country.
Between the years of 2009 and 2016, there has been one class per school year that entered a book in the nonfiction category. The quality of student work, ingenuity of the topic, and the voices of the students resulted in two grand prize winners and three honorable mentions during the eight years the school participated.
The process of authoring and illustrating a class book was always the same. Students selected a topic based on the interests and knowledge of the class, researched the topic using a myriad of resources, engaged in brainstorming and drafting about that topic, selected a text structure for their writing, then worked collaboratively to revise, edit and publish their writing. At the same time, students made decisions about the medium and style for their art work and the techniques they would use to bring their illustrations to life. Working in conjunction with the art teacher, students created art to accompany each page of their writing. The process of creating a class book required making all decisions collaboratively, following strict timelines, and synthesizing information from a number of resources.
What made these assignments so relevant and authentic for the students was that they were writing for an audience of published authors and illustrators, they were writing about topics that mattered to them, and they were ultimately using art and writing to make a difference in the lives of others.
The Kids Are Authors award-winning books created by Mendon Center students are as follows: