The writing assessment tool

Many teachers will be very familiar with the assessment and norms standard called ‘Lexile’ which is used across the US to measure a child’s reading standard and text maturity.

This standard measure is really useful in measuring, assessing and comparing reading standards from one student to another, or across ‘norms’ tables.

Yet, there is no accepted similar metric for writing. We think there should be. 

So we’re developing one.

With your help and feedback, together we can make scoring for writing simple, easy and a standard norm to help measure and improve student progress.



The WriQ Writing Measurement Vision

We believe there is a real need to create a standard measurement for writing, to enable proper management, progress and encouragement of students to express their ideas and thoughts in written form.

But it’s more than that.

We want to do as much as we can to support and create a nation of avid readers and fluent writers. It’s a fundamental part of our Texthelp values.
 

With help from you guys, once the tool has been used lots of times, we’ll be able to create an enormous data set to robustly establish the WriQ score as a standardized norm for assessing writing.

Our promise to you is that this will always be free - for all teachers - and we hope with your contribution that this will benefit the generations of children who’ll be able to understand, improve and progress their written communication skills, just as they do with Lexile levels for Reading.



The detail...

WriQ is a measure which is used to assess the numerical quality of writing. 

Of course, it doesn’t measure expression, creativity, purpose or other qualitative measures of writing, but it can give a more quantitative assessment. 

This is made up of a number of factors:

  Writing Speed in Words Per Minute

  Correct writing speed in WCPM

  Sentence Length

  Text Maturity

  Spelling Accuracy

  Punctuation Correctness

  Grammar Correctness

  Correct Word Sequences

It will then give a quantitative score to a passage of writing so that you can focus on the qualitative measures. 

It’s Early Days

We know WriQ isn't perfect yet...but with your help we can make this a tool that works well for everyone, so please feel free to feedback any bugs, issues, or ideas for improvements - it should be for everyone’s benefit. Thanks!
 

Tell us what you think



Save time & effort!

Some teachers currently take these, or a selection of them, and laboriously count/score a passage manually. Wri-Q takes away the manual time-consuming work and uses a new computer based algorithm to make immediate, hands free scoring a very real possibility.

Once scores are calculated, students receive immediate feedback directly embedded into their writing. This closes the feedback loop, allowing students to know how they did, and what they can do to improve in next time.



Join in!

We’re looking for volunteers to test out our new Google ‘Add On’ within Docs and the Wri-Q Teacher Dashboard. 

Access to this will be free to use and will remain so for all teachers over time - we want to create a freely accessible measure that everyone can benefit from!