Writing Assessment

Start with writing performance

Writing Assessment is a section of Teaching Writing in Education and pedagogy (incl. teaching methods, curriculum, educational psychology). The resources on this page bring together ways to think about writing tasks and how they are assessed.

Start with Types of Writing Performance. It introduces imitative writing, including writing down and some forms of dictation, alongside intensive writing. Another mind map on writing performance includes responsive and extensive writing, as well as examples such as copying, cloze selection and form completion.

Explore writing as assessment

Writing: Check for Understanding and Writing to Check for Understanding both cover narrative, informative and persuasive writing. The first also lists strategies such as interactive writing, Read-Write-Pair-Share and summary writing. Use the maps to consider how different kinds of writing can help check understanding.

The mind map on assessing English learners' writing progress considers how students become aware of their progress and identify their strategies. Another map groups writing by approaches such as independent, modelled, shared and guided writing, and by activities based on experience, a stimulus or a text.

Move from task design to scoring

After exploring the types of writing, look at the mind map on designing writing assessment tasks. It outlines stages of test development, including design, operationalization and administration. The map on scoring procedures introduces rating scales, including primary trait and holistic scales.

For another view of scoring, the map on scoring methods for responsive and extensive writing includes holistic, primary trait and analytic scoring. Compare its terms with the categories in the Essay Scoring quiz, such as response to prompt, organization, supporting details and mechanics.

Use the resources together

Within Teaching Writing, this section keeps the focus on assessment: the maps offer ways to organize ideas about tasks and scoring, while the quiz gives you another resource to use alongside them. Choose a map to study, then try the quiz and return to the scoring terms you want to explore further.