Kimberley Bachmann Classroom Teacher and Primary Literacy Coach
Travelling along the ‘Brightpath’: A writing assessment and moderation journey undertaken by the Year 6 teaching team In alignment with St Margaret’s strategic focus on literacy, a St Margaret’s Innovation Award was granted to the Year 6 team in 2020. Led by myself, acting in a dual role as Year 6 teacher and writing coach, the Year 6 team trialled an online writing assessment and reporting tool called Brightpath. Rationale Assessing writing could never be classed as an ‘easy’ part of a teacher’s job. Even after years in the profession, teachers can still find it challenging to assign a letter grade to a piece of student writing. Marking with a rubric alone requires teachers to deeply understand the small yet discernible differences between descriptors such as ‘partial’, ‘effective’ and ‘purposeful’. And they need to understand what these descriptors actually look like in student writing. And on top of that, they need to apply this marking scheme consistently across a large cohort of students. It is most certainly not an easy job.
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The complexity of writing assessment underpinned the conception and design of the Brightpath Assessment tool. Research in the field of assessment reveals that, 'Teachers draw on multiple sources of knowledge and evidence when making judgements and that the use of standards and criteria alone will not result in consistency of teacher judgements' (Connolly, Klenowski & Wyatt-Smith 2012, p. 596). Therefore, rather than asking teachers to mark student writing solely based on a rubric, Brighpath is based on a ‘pairwise approach’ to assessment (Humphrey & Heldsinger 2020). In the initial stage of Brightpath’s design, a large group of teachers compared pairs of writing samples and judged which performance was of a higher quality. After these 160 student samples were analysed, a rating scale and a set of performance indicators were developed. The result was a set of calibrated student writing examples and performance descriptors that helped teachers understand the discernible differences between writing of varying performance quality. Classroom teachers are supported to make consistent
judgements about writing achievement by comparing their students’ writing to Brightpath’s examples, which sit along a rating scale. High levels of inter-rater reliability can be obtained with the pairwise approach, with correlations ranging from 0.897 to 0.984 in a study asking teachers to compare early years samples to calibrated examples (Heldsinger & Humphry 2013). With these quality assessment principles underpinning the Brightpath Assessment tool, the St Margaret’s Primary School saw the potential to increase professional confidence, increase levels of inter-rater reliability, and also foster moderation conversations in the field of writing assessment. Process Year 6 was chosen as the trial year level which allowed me to work in a dual role as both writing coach and classroom teacher. Once the Year 6 teachers understood the Brightpath assessment process, the first step was familiarising ourselves with the student examples. As previously mentioned, these were organised in a ranking system that demonstrated increasingly sophisticated writing skills. There were accompanying descriptors (which we came to think of as success criteria) that sat alongside the different levels of the rating scale. While we did familiarise ourselves with these descriptors, the Brightpath creators did emphasise that these were not to be used like a checklist. As teachers, this was one of the most difficult shifts to make in our thinking. But there was a solution. It felt a little silly at first; however, we were encouraged to read the student writing aloud. And honestly, this was a ‘game-changing’ approach. Some of the richest conversations we had while simply reading these writing samples to each other, listening to the emerging author voices and discussing the comparative performances of writing. Reading aloud was the element that helped us shift our mindset to the pairwise assessment approach.
