A Different Way to Look at Writing Assessment

As a teacher of writing, this assignment has taught me that, if I take away nothing else from these articles, I need to understand that I will need to use a huge variety of tools in order to adequately assess my students writing abilities.

However, I have also come away with the idea that writing is so unlike any other subject, that assessment of it needs to be varied and looked at from a different lens altogether. As Wilson (2009) discusses, maybe writing cannot be assessed non-objectively, like most other subjects. She is right in that as a reader of text, what we experience is completely subjective. Is it wrong then, for teachers to want to offer their subjective (though hopefully constructive) opinions? I don’t think it is- not everything can be pre-planned and pre-thought out to the point that only good writing can be identified on a rubric, checklist, or success criteria. While these tools are useful to guide writers by structuring their work, it is impossible, as identified in all the articles I read, to consider every aspect beforehand.

As Vincent (2006) discusses, we are so used to thinking of school work monomodally, that we have gotten to the point that we have stopped looking for opportunities to include multimedia into subjects such as writing, even though we know that doing so would appeal to different learning styles, and engage a greater number of students. 

Common Assessment Tool 4: Tests

Tests, both formal and informal, are another common way for teachers to gather information about student writing. Unlike some types of tests such as math, which have specific questions students must answer, writing tests often require students to write a specific writing task within a limited amount of time. Some of these tests include formal standardized tests such as the writing components in grade 3 and 6, the grade 9 OSSLT, and tests which measure certain aspects of writing such as curriculum based measures (CBM), correct word sequences (CWSs), or incorrect word sequences (IWSs).  These can be beneficial to see if students are performing at grade level, to identify areas of strength or areas of concern, and to measure specific aspects of writing.

Some of the major criticisms of testing student writing is that this form of assessment is politically driven, and often undermines or contradicts the process of writing (draft, edit, review) that teachers strive to promote in schools. In addition, teachers often feel tests do not allow students to produce their best pieces of writing, and are thus unfair. Weigle (2007) argues that this type of assessment, while clearly not meant to elicit a student’s best writing, is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, she argues that timed writing is a fact of life, as students will need to engage in this type of quick writing throughout their schooling careers. In addition, she says it can be one of the only ways for teachers to determine for certain what a student is capable of producing on their own, without teacher or parent support. While testing is obviously not ideal to assess all areas of student writing, no one assessment tool is, and used in conjunction with a variety of other tools, tests can be one helpful tool used in the process of assessing student writing.

Common Assessment Tool 3: Conferences

One of the most meaningful forms of writing assessment that I have witnessed within the classroom was teacher-student conferences. This involved students meeting with their teacher for a short time during the writing process, where they could review their work and receive ongoing feedback from their teacher. This helped the teacher know what students strengths and areas for improvement were, and allowed him to offer meaningful, individualized support suited to the needs of the student to move their learning. Below is a video of a teacher and student engaging in a meaningful conference, that utilizes a visual-prompt writing checklist to guide their conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njLGV3drzRo

Common Assessment Tool 2: Writing Portfolio

Writing portfolios are another common assessment tool. When creating a writing portfolio, teachers collect several writing samples across subjects, and include a variety of different genres. These pieces of writing demonstrate a student’s range of writing abilities, show the progress of student writing over time, and can provide a complete picture of the student’s writing. They are a purposeful collection of student work, which show a students writing process, progress, and achievement. Assessment and instruction are seamless, everything the student does is integrated in the portfolio and the assessment process. However, writing portfolios also require extensive time to collect, review, and maintain. In addition, each student’s portfolio contains different pieces of work, which, while highlighting the student’s best work, makes it difficult to assess all portfolios using the same criteria. (Olinghouse, 2009). 

As a writing teacher, I see the benefit of using writing portfolios to assess a student’s writing process (how they draft, edit, and revise their work), as these elements are important pieces of writing that are not evident in a student’s final piece draft. I also see how keeping a record of student’s writing across subjects can be helpful to identify a student’s overall strengths as a writer, and can be helpful to identify areas where they require additional support. I also would find it helpful to see the progress they have made throughout the year, as a way to guide future instruction.

However, while it can provide an overall picture for writing, I’m still unclear on how a teacher would assign a mark to a writing portfolio. Is this not an important element of writing assessment? I wonder if the purpose of a writing portfolio would useful more as a tool to provide information of overall student success and areas for improvement, and less useful as a tool meant to ‘assign a grade’.  This is an area I wish that the articles discussed, and I am curious to hear other’s perspectives on how this tool could be used to assign marks to students.  

Common Assessment Tool 1: Rubrics

Rubrics are a systematic process for assigning scores on a piece of writing. Rubrics are often used to assess the overall quality of writing, often for evaluation purposes. Rubrics usually lists criteria for a piece of work, and educators then mark how well the student had met each set of criteria by assigning it a level 1, 2, 3, or 4. They help teachers to look at the same elements in each piece of writing, and are non-objective, fast, efficient, and easy to use. Rubrics “rate the presence of elements deemed important” (Alber-Morgan et al., 2009), which teachers then use to classify student work according to specific traits. They are also helpful to students, as they clearly identify exactly what is expected of students. Rubrics are ideal when educators want to assess specific aspects of writing within a piece of work (is there a topic sentence, are capital and periods always used, etc).

Unfortunately, as Wilson (2009) notes, rubrics only look at specific writing criteria, and therefore they often force us to see all pieces of writing the same way, which does not allow for educators to offer responsive insight or their own ideas about the content of a piece of writing. In addition, Wilson argues that while they are objective, they are not helpful when assessing writing, as writing is a naturally subjective subject, that requires a reader’s reflections.

One examples Wilson gave in her article was how one student submitted a piece of writing that had sections in it which were obviously plagiarized. Using a rubric, the student would have received a zero. By reflecting on why the student may have plagiarized that section, Wilson found that the subject was too difficult for the student to understand, and helped the student find a new source to help her understand the content.

Watch a video of Maja Wilson discussing her views on writing rubrics here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjKLvvMxXwM 

From my use of rubrics within my practicum, I learned that while the use a rubric can be very effective for explaining to students the expectations that they are required to meet, the rubric itself has to be very detailed and explicit in order for students to understand how each part of the assignment is being marked. For example, when marking a final writing assignment on paragraph writing, in the rubric there was no mention in any section that proper spelling was an important component. However, after completion of the assignment, there were some students who had incorrect spelling in their final paragraphs. Yet, as proper spelling was not stated on the rubric, it would be unfair to make them lose marks for something that the teacher had not told them to do. This made me realize how much time and thought needs to go into making a rubric, and how detailed they need to be. It also helped me see the negatives to assessing writing using a rubric, as there will likely be elements that an educator will fail to account for ahead of time, which will result in the rubric failing to accurately assess every aspect of a student’s work. 

The Problem With Assessing Writing

Unlike some subjects such as science or mathematics, writing is difficult to assess due to the fact that each and every piece of student work will be different from one another. This is a challenge for teachers, as it requires us to create assessment tools that are varied enough to account for an infinite number of writing results, and the large number of skills students use when producing a piece of writing.

This is clearly impossible, as no tool can possibly encompass every such factor. One of the most common themes I identified when reading articles on writing assessment was the idea that teachers need to understand that to assess student writing they need to utilize a number of assessment tools, in order to effectively assess all factors of student writing.

“In short, there is no ‘one size fits all’ method of writing assessment” (Olinghouse, 2009).

To identify which tools to use when assessing student writing, educators need to make decisions about assessment prior to instruction. By articulating objectives in terms of observable behaviour, teachers can make it clear to students and themselves what will effective writing looks like (Weigle, 2007). This then helps the teacher decide which assessment tool is best suited to assess the objectives identified.