204 / 2018-04-08 22:24:41

Standards for developing writing assessments

standards,writing,assessment

全体主题 > Standards in developing language assessments

Despite the rapid expansion of research into the assessment of writing over the past fifty years, and the emergence of general standards of ‘best practice’ in educational assessment (e.g., The Standards for Educational and Psychological Measurement, 2014; Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education, 2004) and second language testing/assessment ( the ILTA Guidelines for Practice, 2007, and the EALTA Guidelines for Good Practice, 2006), and despite the fact that many millions of people take tests of writing and tests of content through the medium of writing every year, we do not yet have explicit standards for developing, implementing and assuring the quality of writing assessment tools in second language learning contexts. This paper proposes a set of standards drawn from empirical work in designing and implementing writing assessment instruments and systems in multiple contexts. These standards are
• Humanistic: built on an understanding of writing assessment as a complex of processes in which multiple authors and readers are involved and revealed;
• Technological: relating advances in recent mass applications of text linguistic tools such as concordancing, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing to the design and use of automated writing evaluation;
• Political: acknowledging a shared responsibility for the impact of writing assessment practices on individuals, institutions, and societies; and
• Ethical: embracing the specific duties of the language tester (as writing assessment developer and researcher) to use all means available to make any language test she or he is involved in as "fair" as possible.

Technical quality standards exist for some individual writing tests and programmes, but a more encompassing set of benchmarks, drawing on recent writing assessment theory tied together with practical understanding of the realities, needs and concerns of those engaged in creating, implementing, evaluating and revising assessment of writing around the world, is needed.
Proposed text and examples will be shown for each standard. Due to the short time for each presentation, these resources will be made available to attendees to access after the conference.