A Systematic Review of Early Writing Assessment Tools

Abstract

There is considerable research regarding measures of early reading but much less in early writing. Nevertheless, writing is a critical skill for success in school and early difficulties in writing are likely to persist without intervention. A necessary step toward identifying those students who need additional support is the use of screening tools. The purpose of this study was to identify tools used with emergent writers and summarize the current state of this empirical literature. A systematic review was conducted for publications between 1990 and 2022. A total of 59 studies focused on early writing for preschool or kindergarten students and met criteria for inclusion in the review. Results indicated the most used early writing measure was Name Writing followed by Letter Writing, and Spelling tasks with some studies using this specific combination of measures. Despite some consistency in the measures used, there was significant variation in the scoring approach. Review of technical adequacy indicated 65% of studies included reliability data while considerably fewer included validity. Future studies using consistent approaches to scoring early writing tasks and additional examinations of validity are needed to improve educators’ ability to identify and intervene in this skill area.