Findings to date An interesting observation that arose from the use of this technique, was that while children might be able to accurately use writing conventions such as the apostrophe, it does not mean that they necessarily understand what they are doing. They may be successfully mimicking the use of a convention, but when they meet some exception to a rule or a more sophisticated circumstance in their writing, they may find their understanding inadequate. Unless a teacher has some evidence of their understanding such as through their attempt to define or explain something the teacher may not know whether further discussion of the convention would be useful for a pupil. In the above examples, a teacher may want to discuss with Hayley what she means by the definition she has given. Perhaps she understands the concept but has communicated her understanding poorly.
Reflection is a difficult skill for children to practise in writing.
The keeping of such records provides pupils with a future reference point, and at the same time provides the teacher with data as a basis for further teaching, or for reporting to stakeholders. The data so far indicates that, apart from simple skills and concepts like a full stop ends a sentence , a child s ability to reflect on understandings of concepts is limited until about age 10 or above although the results are not conclusive at this stage. However, data on examples of a child s usage of skills can be collected from the early stages of writing, depending on the sophistication of the skills being observed. The power of ICT Work is now underway towards collecting this data via an online tool. The teacher or principal registers the school with a password, and establishes a file for each pupil.