Writing Assessment

Developmental Writing Scale

The Developmental Writing Scale (Sturm et al., 2012) is a 14-point measure of developmental writing progress, from scribbling to paragraph writing. It is intended to assess the writing quality of typical writers and writers with disabilities at the beginning stages of writing. It was designed to be sensitive to small changes in writing and capture the refined progress of any beginning writer, including those with complex learning needs (CLN). The DWS tool can be used to inform instruction, drive goal setting, and support progress monitoring.

For more information about the science and development of the DWS, the complete journal article can be accessed through a web link. This link will allow any reader who is not a TLD subscriber to access the article without having to pay a fee. Details are provided below.

The Developmental Writing Scale article has been set as Free on the Topics In Language Disorders journal website –

https://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/default.aspx

 NOTE: The article is copyrighted by Wolters Kluwer and it is their policy to not allow posting of full article PDFs on 3rd party websites.  By posting the link instead of the PDF the article copyright isn’t violated, and individuals can “engage” with the article as they wish, including by downloading a PDF or sharing from the website via their own social media. This also allows us (as the journal publisher) to track article usage.

Text Type Diversity Measure

National standards specify that all students will be able to write across text types (i.e., narrative, informational, and argumentative), yet measurement of text types in the most beginning writers is challenging if mature text structures are used as the framework. The Text Type Diversity Measure (TTDM) provides a valid and reliable tool for capturing the text types of the most beginning writers by using author intent (e.g., past tense grammatical structures reflect personal or fictional narratives), rather than mature text structures, as the basis for measurement. The TTDM can provide educational teams with information about frequency and range of text types of any beginning writer. The TTDM tool can be used to inform instruction, drive goal setting, and support progress monitoring of text types that are in alignment with the national standards.