7. Assessments for Sentence Combining

When you're ready to assess, use the checklists and assessment below to monitor and measure students' skill level for combining sentences using basic conjunctions. Notice how the assessment criteria we provide in this section mirrors what students are taught in the model lessons in this skill explainer. 

To begin, we recommend the use of a simple teacher checklist when analyzing any writing assignment to see whether students are transferring their sentence-combining skills to independent writing.

By monitoring and analyzing student work in this way, teachers should begin to look for trends in both individual student performance and classwide. Recognizing your students strengths and learning needs helps determine whether your instruction has been effective for students and where reteaching or additional support may be needed. As you review the checklist data you should able to answer these questions: 

• What are my students' strengths with the focused skill?  
• What are my students' learning needs?  
• How can I grow students skills through reteaching, scaffolding, and differentiation? 

When you are ready to measure each student's skill level, you may use our Assessment for Sentence Combining listed below. This resource includes: 

• A teacher checklist for analyzing the student responses. 
• Three student recording sheet options. The first includes prewritten simple sentences. The second sheet is for teachers to use to write simple sentences related to their curriculum content. The third sheet is also for teachers to write simple sentences related to curriculum content, but it allows for three simple sentences and a larger set of coordinating conjunctions for students to choose from. 

In this section, you'll review two student writing samples. The first shows a student combining two teacher-provided sentences. The second student sample shows a student applying sentence combining to their independent paragraph writing.

When introducing sentence combining, begin with isolated practice where two sentences are already provided. This allows students to focus on the purpose of the conjunction, the relationship between ideas, and the mechanics of combining sentences before applying the skill in their own writing

In the first sample below, the student applied their sentence-combining skills to simple sentences related to the water cycle, which they were studying in science. 

The student was given two sentences and asked to combine them. As you can see, in the first combined sentence, the student selected the appropriate conjunction (and) and took out repeated words. In the second combined sentence, the student also used the correct conjunction (but). However, the student needs more instruction on how and where to use commas in a complex sentence.

When analyzing this sample you may have noticed the following conclusions:

Strengths:

• Sentence Combining
  • Used combining moves strategically (took out repeated words, added conjunctions)
  • Used appropriate conjunctions to convey intended meaning (and, but)
• Other Skills
  • Capital letter and end punctuation mark used consistently and correctly
  • Strong control of letter formation and spacing

Learning Needs:

• Placement of commas before conjunctions

Next Steps for Instruction: Do a mini-lesson on comma placement for targeted practice. 

The ultimate goal of explicit instruction and practice with the skill is to see students generalize it to their paragraph writing to produce stronger writing. Initially, students may need prompting to go back into their own writing to find a place they can apply sentence combining. That's exactly what you'll notice educator Heather Adams doing with her class in the following video.

Below you'll see an essay about spitting cobras that a third grade student wrote after learning to combine sentences. As part of the essay-writing assignment, students were asked to take a few sentences from their initial draft and combine them using conjunctions.

In the student's essay, the highlighted sentence is the one the student chose to focus on for sentence combining. As you can see, the student used appropriate conjunctions to convey their intended meaning, showing proficiency with the skill. The student added an extra comma before the phrase and scares other animals away (since it's part of a compound predicate with makes and scares), but otherwise would score well on the above rubric for that sentence.