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Hi Joleen,

There’s a lot to unpack with your question! For readers unfamiliar, the Six Traits of Writing refers to an approach for teaching and assessing writing developed by researchers at Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (now called Education Northwest). As the framework’s name implies, six traits of effective writing are taught: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Presentation is an additional trait in the framework that is only applicable when the piece is published, and explains the full registered trademark program name “6+1 Trait® Writing.” The instruction is paired with a rubric, which is arguably the most well-known part of the framework. Teachers use the rubric to give students feedback and assess their writing (or students use it to self- or peer-assess) on the same traits that are taught.

One of the challenges in answering your question about how evidence-based the program is is that, like any program, its outcomes depend heavily on implementation (which can vary widely). Because I can’t guess how you are using the framework in your school, I'll need to draw from my own personal experiences. And unfortunately, neither school represented in these examples equipped staff with professional development from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, so while my experiences with the program's implementation are valid (and likely relatable), I am not an expert on the framework and am not sure if either experience matches how the program was actually intended to be used.

In one school where I worked, 6+1 Trait® was used as the sole writing program, but the only materials we were given were the rubrics, and we were expected to create lessons to teach the traits. In this scenario, instruction varied slightly from lesson to lesson and grade to grade, but it always targeted the same six learning outcomes (mastery of the six traits) over and over from Kindergarten through 6th grade, and quickly grew redundant. I also worked in a school where 6+1 Trait® was embedded within another writing program. In this scenario, the writing program had lessons, meaning we no longer were the ones responsible for designing instruction and ensuring that expectations became more complex from fall to spring, and as students moved up in grades. This made the program easier to implement, but the lessons themselves were missing many elements of explicit instruction. Ultimately, in both experiences, we used the rubrics to diagnose student needs and adjust instruction. But in both experiences, instruction needed to be supplemented to be effective.

My experiences with the framework personally give me pause. One of my concerns is when schools expect the six traits to stand alone as the K-12 writing scope and sequence. Meaning, teachers may infer that there are merely six main skills they need to teach for students to master composition. Although each skill contains multiple subskills (e.g., the “idea” trait is made up of subskills such as “main idea” and “details and support”), the progression on the rubric still doesn’t change significantly across a school career. For example, “Idea: Main Idea” of the K-2 rubric expects students to “[present] a rich, focused, and fresh or original idea; drawing, if present, enhances main idea” while in grades 3-12 the student should “[convey] a clear, focused, complex, and original main idea that drives the piece.” This likely isn't sufficient detail to help a third-grade teacher prepare their students for fourth-grade level writing.

Additionally, the same rubric is expected to be used for all writing, disregarding the differences that exist for both different types of writing (e.g., narrative vs. expository) and different text structures (e.g., chronological order vs. cause and effect). Again, this lack of specificity stands out to me because, as you say, the data I collected on the rubric didn’t feel particularly actionable. After all, writing isn’t a generic skill. Being able to compose a suspenseful short story doesn’t require the same skills that it takes to write an accurate research summary.

Although my concern is my own, I don’t think it’s entirely unwarranted. In a meta-analysis on formative writing assessments in elementary school, Graham, Hebert, and Harris (2015) predicted that 6+1 Trait® would positively improve the quality of student writing, but the results were both disappointing and surprising: it didn’t actually do so. The results of this meta-analysis are concerning and are a critique you should be aware of. But, it's important to note that there are limitations to this study (e.g., the research was only conducted with 3rd-6th grade students, and not all the studies collected measured whether teachers applied the model in these studies as intended).

Yet, I don’t want my response to be all doom and gloom. There are some very positive things that it sounds like are happening in your district that it makes sense to continue to run with. We know that formative assessments can be a transformative tool in education. When teachers use them to collect information about student learning, identify a learner’s needs, and consequently adjust future instruction, student outcomes can improve.

One of the things you might be able to do to make the data collected from these rubrics more actionable is to aggregate it to help you prioritize student needs. Maybe your class would benefit from continued support with organization in their expository writing (e.g., including a main idea and supporting details). If this is the case, after providing explicit instruction in these skills, you could focus your feedback only on this trait, rather than using the rubric to score every trait on every piece of writing. You can also add the specific elements taught that you expect to see in your students’ writing to your rubric. Share a student-friendly version of the organization section of the rubric (with the additional details) with your class. Have them use the rubric as a checklist to self-evaluate their writing or give feedback to a peer. (You can find more information on how to support this skill in our Developing Editing Through Metacognitive Questioning publication.) Monitor students’ progress. Once you start to see proficiency, switch your instructional focus to the next priority. Continue to expect students to use what you taught them about including a main idea and supporting details in their expository writing while continuing to teach a new skill.

The bottom line? Your assessment should provide information you can use to adjust your instruction. If that’s not the case, something needs to change.