Our Writing Stimuli
Writing for purpose
What we've realised over the past few years is that students perform differently, when compared to other children, across different writing genres.
The Collaborative Professional Consensus (CPC) in a narrative doesn't mean that the child will score equally on a non fiction text and vice versa (particularly for children who sit in the 25-75% percentile). In order to get a balanced view of your students' relative performance over the year we always have two or three stimuli in two different genres in each year group, each year.
One of those stimuli is always a narrative and the other could be a letter, poetry, report or instruction leaflet, recount or persuasive argument, for instance.
This enables you to understand better your students', and school's, relative performance over two or three genres within that year group and is useful information for your school to support planning the writing curriculum. You can also compare the narrative the following year to see what improvements the school and the children have made relative to other children in the same year group. We release the stimulus at the start of the writing week and expect that for the 'warm writes' it's likely that, although work is individual to the child, there has been an element of modelling and scaffolding within the specific genre in class in the lead up to the session.
Our Stimulus'
Stimulus
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
We use pictures, video, art work, letters, diary entries or high quality illustrations as stimulus for the 'Moderation of Primary Writing' sessions and keep the tasks low ceiling / high threshold so that everyone is able to access the writing task. We use the same sort of stimulus that you might in your classroom.
We release the stimulus
We use pictures, video, art work, letters, diary entries or high quality illustrations as stimulus for the 'Moderation of Primary Writing' sessions and keep the tasks low ceiling / high threshold so that everyone is able to access the writing task. We use the same sort of stimulus that you might in your classroom.
We release the stimulus at the start of the writing week (three days), giving less opportunity for schools to 'teach to the test' - our low stakes 'test conditions' are the same for each session, for all schools.
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
We'll try, where possible to use some current affairs / news and some Key Stage National curriculum coverage requirements to devise some tasks to help you assess the depth of understanding in your curriculum.
We use some 'cold writing', small descriptive writing tasks and some where we'll give you the genre - 'warm writing' in advance.
Advance notice
Broad scope, curriculum coverage
Advance notice
What we know is that children perform differently for different writing genre in different domains and so we'll tell you well in advance what some of the genres might be to support your curriculum planning and children doing their best. This may be as much as Year 5, a free written Poetry piece or Year 4 a letter - we still release the main context during writing week.