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.