Fluency is an important marker of how well children read and write words. Until recently, however, teachers have had few tools to test students' writing fluency, accuracy, and complexity. This gap in assessment led Dorothy Leal to create The Word Writing CAFÉ, a test that evaluates these skill areas.

Leal, an Ohio University professor of teacher education, has been working with the Chauncey Elementary School in Chauncey, Ohio, designing reading and writing projects to aid students. One focus has been the development of The Word Writing CAFÉ, a new assessment for students in grades one through six that soon will be piloted to grades seven through 12.

“Since we know that word knowledge is critical to comprehension of text, teachers can benefit from a knowledge of their students' word writing ability,” Leal says.

To begin the assessment, the teacher gives each student a grid on a piece of paper and instructs the students to write as many words as they can, one in each square, in the 15-minute time period. Students may not use words twice or copy words at the top of the page, such as name, date, and teacher. The teacher gives prompts during the test. At the end of the 15 minutes, the teacher scores theresults, first by total number of words written, then by number of words correctly spelled, and finally by number of syllables to evaluate the complexity of the child's vocabulary.

The next step in creating a useful assessment test is to norm the results, or find what the average student would score, by which a teacher can compare the class.

Three schools in Ohio, including Chauncey Elementary School, were the first to use the test this past fall and spring. Leal presented the preliminary results at the meeting of the International Reading Association.

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