DD is in a 4th grade gifted program and was expected to write a research paper on one of the states, covering 12 topics like "history", "native americans", "climate", "landmarks", etc. The kids were expected to research via the internet, on their own, in class. DD had no idea what she was doing. She wrote about 1-2 sentences for half of the topics and said she was done.
Her sources at the end looked like this:
www.myteacher.comwww.google.comwww.theclassroomcomputer.comwww.myself.comwww.mymom.comI intervened and helped her and she still got a B or C. She had about 4 pages, single spaced. It seems over the top for a 4th grader, gifted or not. I would love to know how much her classmates did.
I'm really not sure what is normal, but I did do a little test at home with her where I gave her a starter sentence and gave her a minute to think about the starter sentence and then 3 minutes to write. I think it was a CBM fluency test that I found online. I tried it a couple different times and she was writing about 20 words and it should be more like 40-50 for a fourth grader. I put in a request for a special ed eval to look at writing. We've also had private testing that showed big gaps in scores (with fluency being very low).
