ASSESSING WRITING

ASSESSING WRITING

1. ISSUES IN ASSESSING RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

   • Authenticity: a good deal of writing performance in academic contexts is constrained by the pedagogical necessities of establishing the basic building blocks of writing. Scoring: is the thorniest issue at these final two stages of writing. Time: the writer can take an initiative rough conception of a context and continue to refine it until it is deemed presentable the public eye.

2. DESIGNING ASSESSMENT TAKS: RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

   • Paraphrasing: scoring of the test-taker’s response is a judgment call in which the criterion of conveying the same or similar message is primary. Guided Question and Answer: a guided question-and-answer format in which the test administrator poses a series of questions that essentially serve as an outline of the emergent written text.
   • Paragraph Construction Tasks
     • Topic sentence writing: specifying the writing of a topic sentence, scoring points for its presence or absence, scoring or commenting on its effectiveness in stating the topic. Topic development within a paragraph: the clarity of expression of ideas, the logic of the sequence and connections, the cohesiveness or unity of the paragraph, the overall effectiveness or impact of the paragraph as a whole. Development of main and supporting ideas across paragraphs: addressing the topic, main idea, or principal purpose, organizing and developing supporting ideas, using appropriate details to undergird supporting ideas, showing facility and fluency in the use language, demonstrating syntactic variety.
   • Strategic Options
     • Attending to task: a task has been defined by the teacher or test administrator, and the writer must fulfill the criterion of the task. Attending to genre: Reports (lab reports, project summaries, article/book reports), Summaries of reading/lecture/video, Response to readings/ lectures/videos, Narration, description, persuasion/argument, and exposition, Interpreting statistical, graphic, or tabular data, Library Research paper.

3. TEST OF WRITTEN ENGLISH: is in the category of a timed impromptu test in the test-taker are under a 30-minute time limit and are not able to prepare ahead of time for the topic that will appear.

4. SCORING METHODS FOR RESPONSIVE AND EXTENSIVE WRITING

   • Holistic Scoring: Advantages: fast evaluation, relatively high inter-rater reliability, the fact that scores tend to emphasize the writer’s strengths, applicability to writing across many different disciplines. Disadvantages: one score masks differences across the subskills within each score, the scale may not apply equally well to all genres of writing. Primary Trait Scoring: how well students can write within a narrowly defined range of discourse. Analytic Scoring: provides little washback into the writer’s further stages of learning.
   • BEYOND SCORING: RESPONDING TO EXTENSIVE WRITING:
     • Assessing Initial Stages of the Process of Composing: focus your efforts primarily on meaning , main idea, and organization, comment on the introductory paragraph, comment on features that appear to be irrelevant to the topic. Assessing Later Stages of the Process of Composing: comment on the specific clarity and strength of all main ideas and supporting ideas, and on arguments and logic, comment on the adequacy and strength of the conclusion.