Formative assessments
Informal writing beats grammar quizzes

English teachers rarely do formative assessments using informal writing prompts for things like grammar and punctuation rules. It's time we started.

Our colleagues in the hard sciences and math have already mastered informal writing to help them keep tabs on how well students are learning (or not learning) material.

This page contains seven informal writing prompts you can use as models for crafting your own formative assessments of writing mechanics rules students must master.

If you need more help than you find on this page, enter the contest to win one of three copies of Shape Learning, Reshape Teaching to be given away in January 2012. The book answers your questions about the different uses of informal writing and discusses sample prompts not available on the website. Click for contest entry.

Informal prompt on sentence subject

Here's a writing prompt I used with college students. It's equally appropriate for fifth graders.

Write a sentence of 10-25 words.

Identify the simple subject of the sentence.

In 1-3 sentences, define what the term subject means and explain why the word you chose fits the definition. You have 2 minutes to write.

One of my students, a career woman with a responsible position for a major corporation and a couple of teenage kids, wrote a response like this:

I really like that red car.

The subject is car. A subject is what the sentence is about. This sentence is about cars.

That response told me at once that I had to reteach material she misunderstood back in third grade. If her elementary school teacher had used informal writing as a means of formative assessment, I might not have had to reteach the meaning of sentence subject 30+ years later.

3 prompts about collective nouns

Below are three different prompts you could use in discussing the topic of collective nouns. You would probably pick one or at most two of them to use.

Prompt #1. You know that a noun is the name of a person, place or thing. Explain in 1-3 sentences what a collective noun is. In your definition, give at least one example of a collective noun. You have 2 minutes to write.

Prompt #2. Nouns and verbs are supposed to agree in number. When the noun is a collective noun, writers sometimes have trouble deciding whether the noun should be considered singular or plural.

In 1-4 sentences describe how a writer can decide whether a collective noun needs a singular verb or a plural verb. You may give an example to help you explain your point. You have 2 minutes to write.

Prompt #3. Suppose you were writing about the soccer team. Would you say the team is practicing or the team are practicing? Why? Respond in 1-3 sentenced. You have 2 minutes to write.

3 prompts about apostrophes

These prompts all deal with apostrophes, but they are not necessarily sequential.

Prompt #1. Create a sentence in which you show an apostrophe being used to show possession. Explain in 1-3 sentences what "showing possession" means. Use the sentence you created as an example to illustrate your definition. You have 2 minutes to write.

Prompt #2. Possessive nouns and possessive pronouns differ in their use of apostrophes. In 1-4 sentences, explain the difference. Illustrate your point by giving two examples of possessive nouns and two examples of possessive pronouns. You have 3 minutes to write.

Prompt #3. Explain how to make a word plural and possessive. Create an example of a correctly formed plural possessive. Use it to show the correct way to create plural possessives and an incorrect way. You have 3 minutes to write.

These informal writing prompts create formative assessments. The responses give you a quick, immediate snapshot of what students understood.

If they misunderstood, you should reteach the material in a different way until your informal assessments show all students have caught on.