Abstract

     High stakes testing has become synonymous with acquiring a diploma at the secondary level of education. With testing comes anxiety and tension for many students, particularly the tenth grade population. Most students’ actual performances meet or exceed the state’s passing requirement of 220. However, there is a group in most schools that struggle every year to achieve a passing score, even with reasonable accommodations. This is the special education population. For this group analyzing texts and writing a corresponding paragraph(s) can be especially challenging. Specially designed strategies, however, have proved helpful for many students from this population. This researcher’s best practices strategy for improving special education students’ analytical writing is the subject of this thesis.      

     The research thesis presented in this website is a single subject research design about the relationship of creative and reflective writing to writing MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems) open response prompts among tenth grade special education students. Students performed a creative writing task and a self to text reflective connection once a week for ten weeks. While the whole class participated in the instruction and writing assignments, three tenth grade students were the subjects of the scoring and research. The school's name has been changed and the students are presented as initials to protect their identity. 

Overview of Project

     The exemplary practice chosen by this researcher was in response to observations of watching many special education students wrestle with analytical writing during MCAS testing. After contending with the test once in tenth grade, invariably several students must continue to retake the test in order to pass. Some of these students are still trying to pass the test into their senior year so they can graduate with a diploma. The exemplary project proposed was to assist tenth grade special education students in gaining the knowledge and background necessary to achieve a passing score on the state of Massachusetts’ high stakes examination.  

     The project intervention began just after the first of November. Five pre-treatment MCAS open response prompts were administered prior to intervention and baseline tallies were obtained. Intervention consisted of creative writing using vocabulary words from the current reading and reflective self to text connections. For creative writing the students either had to develop original contextual sentences or create a story. The students performed each task once a week for a period of twelve weeks. Two during-treatment past MCAS open response tests given to the students and an end of treatment posttest was also administered. The analyses of the data can be viewed under analyses and findings.