Our second in-depth look at the ICAS assessments is here! ICAS Writing is offered the same week as ICAS Digital Technologies and is a popular assessment. But what does it actually involve, and how can your child be successful in it?
What is ICAS Writing?
This assessment looks at a student’s ability to respond to an unknown prompt and create a 450-word text which is either an argument or a narrative. The assessment runs for 35 minutes regardless of the paper level. Writing is offered for NZ students from Year 4 (Paper A) to Year 13 (Paper J), and is available at Focus Education.
Why sit this assessment?
Writing is a fundamental skill that all students must succeed in, no matter the subject areas they may wish to focus on for university. Most subjects require some form of written assessments, such as essays and reports. Writing is also a key way to embed comprehension-related knowledge, which includes a wide range of vocabulary, slang, formal language and technical jargon, as well as grammatical structures, syntax, and text purpose and conventions. The updated Bloom taxonomy of knowledge has ‘Create’ at the top level of the pyramid as recognition of this. If your child struggles to create texts of different kinds, it is a sign that their reading and writing need support.
What does the assessment cover?
Students are given a prompt and asked to write 450 words. They may be asked to write a persuasive text or a narrative, and will not be advised which until they sit the assessment. You can view the detailed assessment framework on the ICAS website here. The ICAS Writing assessment is unique in ICAS as each test is individually marked by expert assessors following careful marking criteria. The marking criteria is the same regardless of the paper level, which allows for better comparisons across year groups and students’ progress from year to year. The assessment covers three main domains:
- Genre
- Textual grammar
- Syntax/punctuation
While the marking criteria is not available, it is clear from the framework and past papers that students are assessed on the fundamentals of writing, such as sentence structures, coherence and parts of speech. Their knowledge of the genre they write is a key element of this assessment too. Scores are cumulative, which means that ICAS Writing structures the marking so that students must achieve all lower-level criteria before receiving a higher mark in each section. This allows greater certainty that a higher mark equals a well-rounded achievement.
How can my child prepare for this assessment?
The best preparation for ICAS Writing involves a mix of cold writing practice and reading in related text types. We also suggest your child work on their ability to type quickly and accurately, since this will impact how efficiently they will be able to write in the time available. Websites such as TypingClub can help with this.
- Use a past paper or example questions from the ICAS website to get your child used to responding to a prompt within a short space of time.
- The sample tool available here provides practice in both narrative and persuasive writing in a digital environment.
- Identify which part of the assessment your child struggles with the most, and encourage them to practice this. This could be coming up with ideas, writing enough words, or checking their spelling and grammar.
Technical requirements for this assessment
Some schools and centres may provide a device, whereas others may require you to bring a device for your child. ICAS Writing is one of the two ICAS assessments that require a special locked-down browser (Spelling Bee is the other one). This means that in addition to the device meeting the usual technical requirements, which you can check here, you will also need to download the locked-down browser. You can find instructions on this here. Bear in mind that if your child has a device that is managed by their school, only the school will be able to download the browser. We suggest checking the technical setup of your device well in advance of the sitting date for the assessment.
A final note
If you choose to register your child for ICAS Writing at Focus Education, you can find all the registration information along with sitting dates here. Please also ask us about pre-assessment support.
Look out for our next in this series – ICAS In Depth: English – coming soon!
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