Dear Brett Healey,

As you have rightly observed, children's writing is a wonderful topic for research. Notably, writing provides children with opportunities for expressing or communicating their ideas about specified writing topics- a process which involves the esoteric interplay between physical and cognitive factors. As for your question, I refer you to a relevant link that may be quite helpful . Good luck with your research.

Best regards,

R. Biria

https://www.iier.org.au/iier23/mackenzie.pdf

Dear Brett:

You ask for quantitative instruments for analyzing children's writing. I know of no formal and global quantitative instrument for analyzing children's writing, mainly because children's witting may analyzed from several perspectives, such as a morphological, grammatical, and semantic perspective. Note also that children's writing may refer to a six-year-old child, a eight-year-old child, a ten-year-old child and even older children. In addition to this, children's writing may be analyzed, for example, in terms of words per sentence, type of words employed (concrete words, such  as chair, table, desk, and the like, or abstract words such as false, good, beautiful, and the like), sentence structure (correct or incorrect), level of linguistic development (e.g., egocentric language or socialized language) and so forth.  

To count  the total number of written words per sentence and the type óf words employed is a relatively usual and easy quantitative way of assessing children's written fluency and proficiency..

You might appeal also to a qualitative procedure. I am thinking of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and its relation to verbal development. As far as I know, he appealed, for instance, to three types of "Why" children (and leaners)  may employ in their writing and speaking. Psychological whys, physical whys, and logic whys. "Why have  you beard?", a child asks. " Because I like to have beard", an adult responds." "Why do you like this?, and so forth, the child adds.These are examples of the first type of "Whys". As you easily could see, the child at hand is playing with words and, in the end, s/he is not interested in any true explanation. "Why does water freeze in the fridge?, a child may ask. "Because when water is subject to a low temperature it ceases to be lliquid and becomes solid", an adult answers.This example substantiates the second type of whys mentioned above. "Why 2 + 2 makes 4?", a child questions. "2 +2   = 4 because 1 + 1 = 2", an adult responds. This is a simple example of a logic why? 

Contrary to what happens in adults' socialized language (written and spoken), in their egocentric language, writing, and speaking  children under 5-6  years approximately, often use psychological whys, and few, in any, physical and logic whys. The qualitative procedure just mentioned could be applied to other words, such as if, although, and so forth.

Needless to say, a qualitative procedure can be analyzed  in quantitative terms. For example, one might count the number of  times each type of why appears in a written/spoken production.

As language has also a semantic level, which is not the case, for example, of computers. I think that children's writing in any language can also take into account such level. Of course, children's writing may be analyzed in psychodynamic terms. Such analysis can shows us, for example, the extent to which a given child is experiencing a certain affective conflict. This little digression shows us, as Reza says, that children's writing is a wonderful topic for research.  

Needless to say, the more holistic rather than  dualist or reductionist we want to be while analyzing children's writing, the more we should appeal to both qualitative and quantitative procedures. A dualistic and positivistic stance is adopted when, for example, one opposes quantity to quality. Science whatever often appeals to dualistic perspectives, such as nature vs. nurture, social vs. individual, biological vs. psychological, fluency vs. proficiency, and so forth. Fortunately, this sad reality is being replaced  by dynamic and relational systems approaches to action, thinking and felling.

I hope I have got your question(s)  and that my considerations my be of help to you.

Best regards.     

I like the attached model for quantifying writing proficiency.  I think it can be used for the writing of children as well as the writing of adults.

Dear Michael

for good writing to children, you must ask children what they want, may be, skills developing, creativity  and synthesis, ability to think, keep up with the times..

Thank you

Hi Brent,

Your question has generated a lot of good answers.  I think that the best way to focus on writing evaluation is to recognize the complexity of the process and to employ sufficient indices that focus on the effectiveness of the important variables....then you can employ some kind of numerical rating.  Being from Murdoch University, you undoubtedly know the DOE of Western Australia's Writing Developmental continuum and its six (or seven) phases.  I also like to employ a "lens" metaphor and focus on several important aspects of writing.  though I employ a more descriptive approach, it can be quantified....the real key is to find the necessary valid indices of performance and then look at them with a sampling context (e.g., ten minutes, 50 opportunities, five pages) and then put this into a pre-mid-post format.  I have attached a set of notes that I often provide to my graduate students.  Pay particular attention to the DOE Western Australia work and the Performance  Sampling Approach (pages 4-7).

Dear Brett Haeley,

I think you have received many good responses to your question. Assessing writing skills is a far more challenging and complex task than assessing reading skills due to many of the factors mentioned above.

It is especially challenging when it comes to dyslexia. Below I have pasted the abstract of our study of 11-year oldtypical and dyslexic children using keystroke logging-

From  

Morken, F., & Helland, T. (2013). Writing in Dyslexia: Product and Process. Dyslexia, 19(3), 131-148. doi:10.1002/dys.1455

Research on dyslexia has largely centred on reading. The aim of this study was to assess the writing of 13 children with and 28 without dyslexia at age 11 years. A programme for keystroke logging was used to allow recording of typing activity as the children performed a sentence dictation task. Five sentences were read aloud twice each. The task was to type the sentence as correctly as possible, with no time constraints. The data were analysed from a product (spelling, grammar and semantics) and process (transcription fluency and revisions) perspective, using repeated measures ANOVA and t-tests to investigate group differences. Furthermore, the data were correlated with measures of rapid automatic naming and working memory. Results showed that the group with dyslexia revised their texts as much as the typical group, but they used more time, and the result was poorer. Moreover, rapid automatic naming correlated with transcription fluency, and working memory correlated with the number of semantic errors. This shows that dyslexia is generally not an issue of effort and that cognitive skills that are known to be important for reading also affect writing.