The tasks to be used for Assessing America's Writing

Assessing America's Writing consists of three national judging windows per year, for every Grade 1-11:

(schools can choose to take part in any)

We will release the task for each window before the writing week starts (go to the task and the Download national assessment documents link to access them). To see the release and upload dates, check the calendar here. We will also email you when the task is available.

Tasks and timing

Each window involves a specific piece of (non-fiction) writing where The Writing Revolution provides the stimulus that will prompt the students to write.

All the tasks should be completed in no more than one hour.

Conditions

When you judge these tasks, 90% of the judgements you do will involve comparisons of your students. The other 10% will involve comparisons of writing from students from other schools.* This means that in order for the comparisons to be fair, students in different schools have to complete the work under the same conditions.

Therefore, please ensure students complete the work in independent conditions with no use of sentence starters, success criteria, exercise books or other external aids.

The task will be available for download as a PDF document. Display the PDF at the front of the class and/or print off copies of the PDF to give to each student.

Each task will also come with a PDF document with specific teacher instructions for that task. Please do not edit the tasks in any way or give students any extra resources. The reason we have introduced these independent conditions is to ensure fairness and consistency between schools. Assessing America's Writing is not a high-stakes assessment. Adhering to these conditions will give you the most accurate and helpful information possible.

Writing in pen or pencil?

For all grades, if possible, please make sure students write in pen. This helps the readability of the writing when the papers are scanned and uploaded for the judging.