Assessing Writing

By: Licda Cleopatra Noel Drummond

Assessing writing skills is important becasue good writing ability is highly sought by higher education institutions and employers. Some of the things to do to ensure valid and reliable writing assessment are:

• Avoids an approach of assessing writing ability by giving students plenty of opportunities to practice a variety of writing skills.
• Gives multiple-measures writing assessement by using tasks that focus on product and process.
• Gives frequent writing assessments because she knows that assessment is more reliable when there are more samples to assess.
• Avoids using a red pen to mark students' papers.

Approaches to writing assessment

Indirect measures of writing assessment assess correct usage in sentence-level constructions and assess spelling and punctuation via objective formats like multiple choice and cloze test.

Direct measures of writing assessment assess a student's ability to communicate through the written mode based on the actual production of written texts.

They are some considerations in designing writing assessment tasks. The first element of a good writing assessment is the rubric, the instructions for carrying out the writing task. A rubric can also mean the set of criteria on which a piece of work, such as a project, is evaluated, and it is used in this sense in elementaru education. The second essential part of any test of writing is the writing prompt as the stimulus the students must respond to. We can identify three main prompt formats: base, framed, and text-based. The first two are the most common in second/foreign language writing assessment. Base prompts state the entire task un direct and simple terms, whereas framed prompts present the writer with a situation that acts as a frame for the interpretation of the task. Text-based prompts present writers with a text to which they must respond or utilize in their writing. The third essential element of good writing assessment es the expected response, a description of what the teacher intends students to do with the writing task. Before communicating information in the expected response to students, the teacher must have a clear picture of the type of response the assessment task should generate.

Issues in Writing Assessment

They are some issues in writing assessment that I will share with you and it is important to know such as:

1. Time allocation.
2. Process versus product.
3. Use of technology.
4. Topic restriction.

The techniques for assessing writing are two free writng and guided writing. The free writing requires students to read a prompt that poses a situation and write a planned reponse based on a combination of background knowledge and knowledge learned from the course. The guided writing in contrast, requires students to manipulate content that is provided in the prompt, usually in the form of a chart or diagram.

Authentic Writing Assement include the following elements:

1. Student-teacher conferences.
2. Self-assessment (dialogue journals and dialogue journals)
3. Peer assessment (another assessment technique, involves the students in the evaluation of writing). 
4. Portfolio-based assessment (examines multiple pieces of writing produced over time under different constraints rather than a single essay written in a specified time period.).  

The writing assessment scales includes the holistic and analytic. The holistic marking scales is based on the marker's total impression of the essay as a whole. Holistic marking is variously as impressionistic, global, or integrative. marking. The analytical marking scales raters provide separate assessments for each of a number of aspects of performance.

They are some things to remember about the writing assessment such as:

- Give students multiple writing assessment opportunities.

- Develop prompts that are appropriate for the students.

- Evaluate all answers to one question before going on the next.

- Mark only what the student has written.

- Get students involved.

- Provide students with diagnostic feedback.

GLOSARRY

1. Snapshot:  A record or view of a particular point in a sequence of events or a continuing process.

2. Benchmark: To provide a standard against which something can be measured or assessed.

3. Cloze: A test of comprehension and grammar in which a language student supplies appropriate missing words omitted from a text.

4. Prompt: to make somebody decide to do something.

5. Approach: A way of doing something.