Gordon Blaine West

Writing assessment for multilingual kindergarteners

2023 – Current

This project is connected to work I am doing with my team at WIDA to investigate 1) how multimodality supports kindergarten writing in assessment contexts, 2) how test administrators work to support young writers in assessment contexts, and 3) how young learners use multimodality when they compose writing in these contexts.

Multilingual kindergarten learners’ writing development

2019 – 2023

I worked together with a team of kindergarten specialists and an intern at WIDA to develop and apply a coding scheme to a corpus of writing samples from multilingual kindergarten learners. We investigated how learners used different features of writing to convey meaning, demonstrating that although learners may be developing mechanical features like capitalization and word boundaries, they are still capable of using sophisticated discourse features like different forms of cohesion, to develop complex written narratives.

Tracing global narratives

2018 – Current

I am working with a global network of researchers connected to the Global StoryBridges project to investigate how young learners make meaning as part of an educational, transnational digital communications project. My dissertation research grew out of this project and I continue to be connected in an evolving role as a researcher.

Speaking responses project

2018 – 2023

I worked with a large team of researchers over the course of five years to code and analyze a corpus of 1-12 speaking responses to a high-stakes standardized assessment. I worked primarily as a project manager and coding specialist with the project, working to train 12 other researchers who worked on the project over a 5 year period. In the course of this work, I also helped develop an automated coding program and helped develop a conceptual shift in the way we use AS-units to code spoken language.