The Writing Architect assessment was developed to innovate Curriculum-Based Measurement in Written Expression for administering and scoring students’ informational writing. The innovations are:

• Using an informational passage as a prompt, which is the primary genre required for the standards and state tests in grades 5 and 8.
• Scoring that switches from a rubric score that is hard to interpret and see growth to frequency counts that make visible to both educators and students the goal-setting components of writing.
• Scoring that aligns directly and intuitively with theories of writing development (i.e., Direct and Indirect Effects of Writing model; Kim & Graham, 2022) and research-based instruction (Troia, 2014) for:
  • Text structure (TIDE)
  • Word Complexity (Vocabulary)
  • Word Accuracy (Spelling)
    • Do you need rationale to include spelling in your school’s curriculum and your students’ IEPs? See this excellent webinar.
  • Sentence Accuracy
  • Typing Fluency

The development of a computer application to contain the administration and scoring of the Writing Architect 2.0 was supported by grant #R305A210061 from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute for Education Sciences. The application was created using open source code so that any education agency can install the application on a server and run it. The open source application will be available on github in 2026. Instructions are available for launching the application; however, the installation, launch, and maintenance of the application may take a person with some expertise in computer programming.

Alternatively, some educators and researchers may wish to use the Writing Architect protocol on their own without setting up the application. To do this manually, follow these directions

Our excellent computer programmer, Thomas Toaz, also created a mini web application to help educators score Text Structure and Word Complexity. Educators can access that here.