Scaffolding Students’ Writing Processes Through Dialogic Assessment

Abstract

If you are seeking a better way to give feedback to student writers, dialogic writing assessment may be for you. E ducation leaders are showing new interest in personalized learning and assessment (Barnum, 2018). For teachers of literacy, this shift is an opportunity to consider formative writing assessment practices anew. In this article, we explore the potential of dialogic writing assessment (Beck, 2018) to provide such opportunities through individualized scaffolding of students' writing processes. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that unites conversation with what is traditionally known as thinking aloud. It foregrounds students' composing processes to reveal and address the obstacles that interfere with those processes: The teacher encourages students to verbalize their composing processes and then attempts to support those processes with prompts and questions. These prompts and questions, along with written materials that the teacher offers during the session, act as scaffolds for students' writing processes.Scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) of literacy processes can enhance students' capacity for meaning making (e.g., Hinchman & Chandler-Olcott, 2017). In this article, we present portraits of several teachers' practice to illustrate how skilled interplay between assessment and instruction based on close observation of student writing processes is involved in achieving this goal. Rather than proposing one best way of practicing scaffolding in dialogic writing assessment, we offer multiple examples of practice that we consider noteworthy for demonstrating close alignment between assessment and instruction. We also explore how this scaffolding can be "contextualized…in light of the value systems" (Smagorinsky, 2018b, p. 255) that shape teachers' practice, tracing the ways in which their scaffolding decisions are personally and institutionally specific. We hope that by highlighting the essential role of teacher judgment in matching instruction with learner needs, this depiction will serve as a gentle challenge to one-size-fits-all models of effective writing instruction.We describe the background and contexts of the participating teachers, summarize the design of the study, and offer descriptive portraits of the teachers' work with students. These portraits are designed to answer two research questions:1. How did variation in three teachers' support for students' composing processes in dialogic writing assessment show responsiveness to the students' individual needs?2. How did the teachers' support reflect their goals for writing and their institutional contexts?

Navigating and hybridizing interpretive claim-making across discursive communities

“…Conventions for making a claim vary, with literary claims typically focusing on how a specific type of close analysis yields a different meaning than a surface analysis, or on interpreting relations between form and meaning. To help scaffold students' claim-making processes, teachers may encourage certain lines of questioning to help students take up a disciplinary lens on the task or text at hand (Beck et al, 2020). Knowing what questions to ask of a text is an important part of disciplinary thinking.…”

Vertical Grammatical Variability in Writing

“…Scaffolding was found to improve the participants' problem-solving skills. Alake and Ogunseemi (2013) Recently, a number of researchers have shown that scaffolding can be beneficial in teaching the four language skills (Ahmadi Safa & Rozati, 2017;Beck et al, 2020;Mitchel & Pessosa, 2017;Zarei & Alipour, 2019;Zarei & Rezadoust, 2020).…”

Using Dialogic Writing Assessment to Support the Development of Historical Literacy

“…It is a specific way of conducting writing conferences (Atwell, 2014; Calkins, 1986) that invites students to compose during the conference so that teachers can assess and support their writing process. Dialogic assessment has been found to help ELA teachers identify strengths and challenges not evident in students' writing alone (Beck et al, 2015), as well as allowing them to support students in working through challenges in ideational, social practice and structural aspects of literary interpretation (Beck et al, 2020). Yet, the promise of this method for assessing and supporting students' reading and writing processes in the discipline of history has yet to be explored.…”