7. Assessing Your Students

Teachers can collect assessment data to see whether their instruction is effective or if any students need additional support in learning to write any of the types of sentences. When you're ready to assess, use the checklists and assessment suggestions below to monitor and measure students' skill level for writing the four types sentences.

Analyze Student Writing

One of the best ways to assess students' understanding is by analyzing their writing. We recommend the use of a simple teacher checklist (opens in new window) when analyzing any writing assignment to see whether students are transferring their sentence writing skills to independent writing.

Looking closely at your students' work helps you identify which skills students have learned, where they need additional support, and how to plan your next steps for instruction. As you review your students' writing, ask yourself:

• What does this student do well?
• What errors or misconceptions do I notice?
• What instruction or scaffolds will help this student improve?

In the sample above, for example, you might see that … 

• The student can form questions.
• The student needs help using punctuation marks correctly. 

Teacher Tip

Enlist Your Colleagues
Reviewing student work with colleagues helps ensure consistent expectations and scoring across classrooms and grade-levels.

Three Assessment Options for Types of Sentences

1. Use an Ending Punctuation Assessment (opens in new window) to quickly determine whether your students recognize the purpose of each type of sentence by applying the correct ending punctuation. Keep in mind, you can read the sentences aloud to students who might have difficulty reading them on their own.

Ending Punctuation Assessment

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2. Turn a Writing Statements, Questions, Exclamations, and Commands (opens in new window) activity into an assessment to determine whether your students can generate and write each of the sentence types in isolation. You can use a picture prompt and ask your students to write one of each type of sentence all relating to the picture. Here's a link to our lined paper (opens in new window), which you can print for your students to use.

Writing Statements, Questions, Exclamations, and Commands

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3. Create an assessment to determine whether your students can write using a variety of sentence types to carry meaning across sentences. You can use a picture prompt or give your students a story starter sentence and ask them to write a story that includes at least one of each type of sentence. Then check student work against the simple checklist to measure (opens in new window) students' skill level for writing the four types of sentences. 

Four Types of Sentences Checklist

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