Episode 139: Creative Tasks Still Have Specific Requirements 

TRANSCRIPT:

You're listening to the Parents of Hardworking Teens podcast, episode 139. The third experience in my trio of things that totally changed how I see exams, assessment, and study. In particular, the way I see open and more creative tasks and had me discover the importance of knowing exactly what you're being marked on. 

Hey VIPs, how are you going? I hope you're doing really well. I am very excited to share this third item on my list of three things that totally changed how I see study, exams, and assessment because it's an experience that really highlights some of the most critical concepts that I want to share with you and with students everywhere. And it really came from a pretty unexpected place. Now, if you would like to catch the first two things that I have shared, then absolutely go back and catch 137 and 138. They are in chronological order in terms of my experiences, but it's not critical that you necessarily listen to them in order. 

So let's dive in with my experience as a NAPLAN writing test marker. Now, I will say straight away that I was doing this marking as a non-English specialist, and I think that's what's given me quite a unique take on this and led me to have some very significant takeaways. 

So let me first just briefly explain how I even came to be doing this type of exam marking. So for those of you who may not be familiar, NAPLAN is a national test that students do in years three, five, seven, and nine to be able to monitor progress specifically in numeracy and literacy. 

Now there are four tests. There is the language conventions, the reading test, the numeracy test, and then the writing test. Now I separate those out because the first three are all computer marked. They're all marked digitally in an automated system. But the writing test is the only one that is basically still marked by humans, and it still is today. But I am rewinding the clock back to 2013, and I know it's 2013 because I have dug out my marker's marking booklet. 

So the training booklet that we use with the marking criteria and all of my notes and the training sample scripts, it's got everything still in there. I went and dug it out in preparation for this particular episode. And the reason that I was even doing this marking is because I had been sort of slightly randomly given on my timetable an essential English class. 

Now, I know that sometimes these things happen in schools where a non-specialist teacher will get put on a class that is not their subject specialism. And that was happening for me and this poor class that had me as their essential English teacher. Now, essential English is like the level below the standard English for the senior year groups in year 11 and 12. So it's not that the content was challenging for me to teach, and I was like fine with the sort of comprehension and analysis side of things, but what I was not good at, and obviously what is needed at those more foundational levels was the things around actually teaching, you know, literacy skills, grammar, teaching explicit writing skills. That was something I had no experience of, and I will say did not feel confident or competent in doing, but obviously wanted to be able to do a good job of for those students. 

So I was, you know, doing my own sort of learning and research and kind of a bit of self-training around some of those things. But one of the things I saw come up as a basically an opportunity, I saw it as was to be a NAPLAN writing test marker. So by then I was already, you know, super interested in the examination side of things, assessment side of things, and of course, I needed to build my skills in being able to really help these students and teach them some quality English skills. So I applied to the exam board, and I think because I was teaching an Essentials English class, and because I'd had previous experience by then as a marker, I got accepted. 

Now, the thing to know here is there are essentially two types of writing tests. They mix and match them across different years when they test them. They don't tell teachers or you know anyone what they are going to be testing on the writing test. It can either be a narrative or it can be a persuasive piece of writing. And students get free choice in exactly what they want to write about, but it has to be in the correct genre that is required, narrative or persuasive. And they are given a stimulus, they are given maybe like a bit of a theme or a few ideas or a bit of a direction to go in. 

In my first year of writing test marking, it was a narrative piece. And I will say that all of the marker training and everything I had to go through in order to be able to do that marking, it definitely helped me see and learn and be able to then convey and teach more around the grammatical terminology, the skills, the requirements around all of those very core foundational English and literacy and writing skills. Because if I could figure out how to mark it and what students needed to be doing and what was considered as accurate and what wasn't, then I could sort of reverse engineer that and I could figure out how to better teach it. And that's what the whole point of this was. 

However, as with all of these things, the sort of unexpected impact is what has stuck with me and is what I'm going to share with you today. Because what really made an impact on me and what really stood out was how the mark scheme was structured, what the content was and the criteria were in the mark scheme, and how specific it was, given that these writing tasks are relatively open in terms of there is a choice of topic, and the students are not told exactly what to write, they just have to stick to that genre. It actually took me back to my year nine English teacher. 

This was the first time, and I vividly remember it still sticks with me. I always remember the time when my teacher was stood at the front and said, There's no right or wrong answer. Like as if that was a helpful thing. And I'm sure to some students it was, but to a student like me who has a more kind of numbers brain and likes steps and likes to know that this is wrong or this is right, and ideally, I can look it up in the back of the book and check. That was not helpful. And obviously, that is something that happens a lot in English tasks, creative tasks, discussion tasks, where there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer. 

You know, you can choose if it's persuasive, you can choose what your argument is gonna be. If it's a particular character, maybe you're writing about, you can choose which character to write about. But what I saw when we started training on the specifics of the marking guide was that there were 10 criteria. And I will tell you there are also 10 criteria for the narrative writing as well. 

So what I'll do is I'm gonna put a link to the PDF files that are published by Akara for the narrative writing test marking guide and the persuasive writing test marking guide. Okay, they are out there online for all to see. I'm gonna put links to those on the resources page for this podcast episode. That is www.rocksolidstudy.com forward slash one three nine for episode 139. 

What I saw, and you will see this if you want to go and compare them both, is that there are 10 criteria. They are very specific, and there is only one difference in the writing test marking guide for narrative and the writing test marking guide for persuasive. So I'm gonna read out what those are, and then you'll be able to see quite quickly what is the only one that is different. 

So criterion number one is audience, then it's text structure, then it's ideas, character and setting, vocabulary, cohesion, paragraphs, sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. And you can probably guess that it's criterion number four, which changes for persuasive, and instead of character and setting, it is persuasive devices. 

Now, again, you can read the sort of description of what each of those ones really means and how many marks are given to each of those criteria. They are not the same marks for every single one. But what I think is really interesting, because I didn't know this at the time in my first year, it's only over the years that I've realized oh, it's basically the same. There's just one change in one criterion across the two different types of writing. 

And so you can imagine, as a non-English specialist and as someone who does not love the sort of open and more creative sides of things in terms of being able to work well with them, I was delighted to see these 10 criteria listed out and then to go through all of the training that we had on them. 

But here's the first big thing that I realized as we went through the training and then as I got into marking all of the responses. The first thing was that the story or the persuasive topic that students are choosing to write about was not particularly important. 

Yes, there is one criterion that is called ideas, and that is, it says in the marking guide, the creation, selection, and crafting of ideas for a narrative or a persuasive piece. Now, what that means is they could have a fairly basic or simple idea, but if they do those other nine things really, really well, they can score amazingly. 

Likewise, a student could have the most creative and unique and wonderful idea, but if they are not performing well in those other nine criteria, they are not going to score well. And this is where I see students in assignments, in essays, in tasks, feeling like they've done really well or come up with something really fantastic, but then not getting the marks or the result that they were expecting or felt like they should be achieving. 

This writing test was not so much about coming up with an amazing storyline or having a really interesting topic to discuss persuasively. It was about having the skills in being able to write about that thing effectively. So have they used paragraphs correctly? Have they got a variety of sentence structures? Are they using punctuation accurately? Have they got a high range of sophisticated and well-fitted vocabulary?

Together, those are the things that are going to lead to those higher marks and those higher results. And I should say that this is not about how to help your child perform well in NAPLAN. 

I know that NAPLAN has quite a bit of controversy about it in terms of testing students. That is not what this is about. 

This is about the bigger picture and what this extrapolates to in terms of your teen's assignments and assessment and even their exams, because I know that there are definitely exams where they have to come up with an idea on the spot or integrate or use sources and stimulus items that they're given. 

This is about your teen being clear on what is important and what will make a big difference to their result and where to put in their effort and where to put in their time and where they don't need to, and getting really clear on what are they actually being judged on, what are they being marked on. And that was really another thing that came through from this experience. I was really surprised at how specific the marking was for specific things. 

So I will use, I said I went and got my old uh marking booklet, my trading booklet, and I've got all these notes and all these scribbles and all these annotations and highlights all over it. And I was like, I know it has some stuff in here about really specific, like numerical cutoffs for things. It isn't just a judgment. 

Sometimes on big extended responses, the criteria are kind of like a judgment call about does this count as sophisticated? Does this count as discerning? This marking guide, and I know others also like it, was very specific. 

So, for example, to get five out of six marks for spelling, students had to say, and it literally says this in the marking guide, you can go find it, at least 10 difficult words. So words that are deemed as difficult, and we had specific descriptors as to what a difficult word is in terms of um blends of letters, number of syllables. There's a whole list in the appendix at the back of lists of words of ones that are classed as common words, difficult words, challenging words. Um, six out of six marks is at least 10 difficult words and some challenging words, or at least 15 difficult words, if no challenging words. Like so specific. You can see the markers, because we used to all go and do this in a big marking hall. Literally like counting on, you can see their fingers going on their hands, like counting up how many difficult or challenging words have we got to so far as we've been reading through this response. 

Ah, another thing on here, I'd forgotten about this one. I've got a note here that says if a student spells one word correctly, but then also in another spot in their writing spells the same word incorrectly, they basically cancel each other out. So this is a great example of where I tell students, don't hedge your bets. Like pick a side and stay on that side. Because if you think about it, if a student isn't sure how to spell a particular word and they know they want to use it, and it could still count for vocabulary, let's say, I'll come on to that in a second. I've got another point I want to make about that. But if they spell it two different ways and one of them is right and one of them is wrong, then it's cancelled out anyway. They end up with no credit for it. If they spell it the same way twice and it's incorrect, then again they're getting no credit, but that's the same as the two different versions. And if they pick the way that is correct, then they're gonna get the credit. 

Now, I'm not really big on trying to get into the tactics that specifically, but I thought it was really interesting to consider this and just think about it in terms of how specifically and how kind of rule-driven some of these marking criteria really are. And like I said, for me as a rule follower and someone who likes black and white, this was really good news in terms of marking something that was ultimately out of my comfort zone because I was not and still am not, an English teaching specialist. 

One other example I also wanted to share with you on that, that I have shared, I haven't shared this tip for a very, very long time, but I know I have shared it maybe on one of my webinars, and definitely I've shared it with students on a coaching call before now, is punctuation. I remember this standing out to me. 

If students have put a sentence and they have put two exclamation marks at the end of it, this tended to happen much more in persuasive writing where they're trying to make an impactful statement. Although it can happen in narrative writing, maybe in something verbal when there's a spoken piece from a character, they might put two exclamation marks to really emphasize it. That counts as incorrect punctuation, which I thought was really, really interesting. 

So I was like, never, is a bit like when I went back to class and was like, if you ever write the word pollution, you must write what type of pollution it is. And in this case, it was like if you ever put an exclamation mark, do not do a double exclamation mark because it will actually drop you marks. You won't get credit for using that exclamation mark, even though on the punctuation criterion you do get credit for the amount of different types of punctuation that you use. 

Now, the third thing that I wanted to draw out on this a little bit further was that I saw how much the different elements, even though they were different criteria, often overlapped. So, for example, if we take something like criterion five, which was vocabulary, like use of appropriate and creative and sophisticated vocabulary, like not just he said, but you know, he screamed. That's a really obvious one we often use, isn't it? For like, can we have a better word than said? But taking that, and then also criterion 10, which was spelling, those are gonna probably overlap because using a word that maybe is a higher level, more sophisticated, more interesting, more creative vocabulary is likely to be a more challenging, more difficult word to spell. 

It's likely to be a more complex word rather than a simple word. Not always, but sometimes. And so improving students' use of vocabulary, selection of vocabulary was likely to overlap with spelling. And we could even say possibly overlap with criterion one, which was audience, the writer's capacity to orient, engage, and affect the reader. So the better vocabulary and word choices they have, probably the more engaging and effective their writing is going to be. 

And to just zoom out on that for a moment, this is what I talk about a lot, which is the skills of strategic, effective study, the skills that make study smoother, more streamlined, faster, more efficient, are often the exact same skills that also lead to higher marks, better grades, better results. Because if we are able to dissect the question, for example, if we are able to predict the mark scheme of how this is gonna be marked, where the marks are gonna be allocated, what the teacher, what the marker is gonna be looking for, number one, we can write a much more succinct answer, more quickly, more easily, but also we're gonna be giving a more direct, more effective, higher quality response that actually answers the question. 

If you'd like to dive a bit deeper on that, I did a whole episode around that called The Skill Web, which was episode 24 on the podcast. I'll put it in the show notes, I'll put it on the resources page, because it really helps students to maximize their skills and strategies when they can magnify the effect, when they can multiply the impact of those skills and strategies. 

So, what I took away from this experience was that number one, even in a creative task, success isn't about coming up with the most unique or creative ideas. It's about how well you execute on the skills that are actually being marked. What is actually being tested? The story is just the vehicle for being able to prove that you can use a range of punctuation effectively, that you can structure your points or your scenes into paragraphs that you can spell accurately. 

The second thing was just how specific the marking criteria can be for a task that is not as specific in terms of there's not a specific right answer. There isn't a one-word or one piece of information that a student needs to be writing here. And yet the marking criteria can be really specific, which just goes to show how important it is for your teen to know exactly how they are being marked, what are they being marked on, and how is their work being judged. If a student knows I've got to get in at least 10 difficult words into this page of writing, they're in a much stronger, more informed position than the student that thinks I just need to come up with an interesting story. 

And that links to that third takeaway, which I think is one of the most important things that you and your teen can also take away from this, is do they know exactly what they are being tested on through this task or assessment? Where do they need to be focusing? What do they actually need to be putting effort into? 

Because in years since I have actually done supervision for these NAPLAN writing tests in schools, and it pains me to see so many students trying to come up with unique ideas and special characters or a particularly controversial or interesting topic for a persuasive piece. And I see them doing their spider diagrams of all of their ideas, and if they just knew that it's not about the idea, it's not about coming up with the most creative piece, it's about their word choices, it's about their cohesion, it's about their paragraph structure. That's the stuff that's going to count for them. 

And when your teen knows what those things are for their assessments, for their tasks, for their assignments, their inquiry reports, then they are gonna be much better placed to know where to put their effort, where to put their time, and where to put their focus. And that's gonna result in a better quality piece, a higher mark result, and gonna save them a whole lot of time and effort that may have been wasted otherwise. So that was an experience that was definitely challenging, definitely out of my comfort zone, but for sure rewarding, and in helping me do a good job of teaching the essential English class, but also was a huge part in continuing to drive this interest, this obsession with understanding how assessment and exams really work, getting behind the scenes of the marking systems, the criteria, and how they operate and how they're applied and how they're used, and just what a difference it makes when your teen understands how all of this works as well. 

Because, like I said, this is not secret stuff that is supposed to be kept under lock and key. I never share anything that I'm not allowed to. There are for sure things that I work on with exam boards that I am not allowed to share in terms of, you know, the papers, the questions, the marking guides, when they are being written and devised. But everything that I share with you and with students is all stuff that is published publicly. I just like to make sense of it and develop it into a format that is much more easily digested and understood and then applied by students in their everyday life, their final exams, and everything in between. 

So I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear your feedback about which of these three things that I have shared feels like it will be most useful to your teen or is the missing piece and will make a big difference to how they see, how they tackle, how they approach their study, their exams, their assessments from now on. Email support at rock solidstudy.com. I would love to hear from you. 

Have a wonderful rest of your week, and I'll catch you back here soon. 

Take care. Bye.