Writing is an essential skill that is developed across all year levels. Brightpath is a writing assessment tool we use to support students in improving their writing skills and helps teachers to analyse, plan, and deliver targeted teaching that makes a measurable difference.
Brightpath is a program that has formative writing assessments. So twice a year we give a story prompt to transitions right through to year six and we ask the students to respond to that prompt. We analyse those prompts and the students levels of attainment.
We had to respond to a prompt about The Wishing Stone, and I like writing it hand written.
For me, I like writing it on, a device so I can redo my mistakes.
And I think it’s good to have both ways, because sometimes it’s easier for people to do it like this way, and like that way. Across our school for a number of years, it has been a daily expectation that students write. That they have control of their writing, that they are involved in choice writing. We know from research that this is how students improve their skills when they’re invested in their writing.
I think the benefit of Brightpath is definitely knowing what your score is and how it challenges you to get better at what you’re not very good at.
Having teacher feedback, and feedback from anyone, helps with your writing.
It’s like checking in. How are our students going? So through the pre test, the targeted teaching, and then the post test, we can gauge the effectiveness of our teaching on our student learning outcomes.
I like Brightpath because I can look on the ladder and see where I am. Because I’m at a high stage, I might not go any higher but I can still work on skills at that level. , I like to see my improvement, because if I look at my persuasive, I don’t think I’m very strong in my persuasive, but I’m quite strong in my narrative.
Not only do we give that information to the students themselves, but we’re trying to decide in which direction the school should go at each year level and to build from year to year on our expertise, the students expertise, and for our students to be attaining a higher level according to the Australian Curriculum.
I think Brightpath really helps with our writing, which is a really good skill to have later on in life.
I also think it will benefit us when we go to university and we do exams.
It’s a program that helps teachers to be able to analyse writing in their cohort regularly. It helps them to be able to interpret the students writing and share those results with their students to inform their next steps. And, across the school we can see trends that we can say are positives, things we need to address, so basically we have a very strong program across the school that’s been here for a number of years that helps our whole staff, it helps our students, and it’s helping our students to become better writers on a daily basis.
