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Designing writing

assessment tasks

The process of development

Design stage

It begins with consideration of the test purpose ​

It is important to consider all aspects of test usefulness reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact, and practicality) from the very beginning of the test development process.

Once the purpose for the test and the target population have been identified, the construct that the test is intended to measure needs to be defined. Also, the role of strategic competence and topical knowledge need to be specified in the construct definition.

Operational stage:

It is used to create test specifications, or blueprints for the Development of specific test tasks and complete tests.

Test specification should have at least these elements:

- A description of the content of the test, the organization of the test, a description a number of test task, time allotment for each task, and specifications for each test task/item type.

- Criteria for correctness

- Sample task item.

Specifications may take different forms, depending on the particular audience.

According to the type of specification, these specification includes a description of the skill or construct being measured, specific information about the prompt, or instructions to the test taker, the attributes of the expected response, a sample item, and other information that will be useful for test writers.

Administration stage

It is the administration of test tasks to examinees, both on a trial basis and operationally, and the concurrent collection and analysis of test data and other relevant information about the test procedures

In pre-testing, various tasks are tried out on a very small sample of test takers to get preliminary information about various aspects of the task.

Pilot testing, on the other hand, involves administering a complete version of a test to a larger sample in order to get statistical information

Considerations in task design

Subject Matter

Stimulus Material

Genre: by form or function of the writing

Time allotment

Instructions

Choices of task

Trabscription mode: Handwriting and word processing

Use of dictionaries and other reference materials