“Teaching Conventions in a State-Mandated Testing Context” – Bonnie Warne, 2006

Warne brought in so many of her personal experiences and struggles with teaching writing into this article. She discusses the struggle teachers face with trying to balance teaching the writing process as students learn best and teaching the vocabulary and “steps” as they will see it on standardized tests, like the ISAT.
The students that we teach come from all walks of life. We take them as they are and try to bring them as far as we can in the short time we are given. Testing vocabulary and format are so specific to the testing world that we must spend time preparing our students for being successful on these tests by spending time teaching students how to take them and what they will need to know. This is unfortunate, since as Warne argues, filling out multiple-choice questions about writing is NOT the same thing as knowing how to go through the writing process.