A Usable Past For Writing Assessment

By Author: mark
Total Articles: 61
Comment this article

We take part of the title and purpose of our essay from the fiftieth anniversary issue of College Composition and Communication to emphasize that by understanding the importance of assessment historically, those engaged in writing assessment can use it more effectively in the present. We believe that assessment should be part of all English department and writing program administrators' (WPA) agendas, not because of external mandates, but because of the benefitsThomas Sabo Charms to teaching and learning that assessment can foster. However, we also recognize that assessment can have deleterious effects on curriculum, teacher agency, and student learning. To create a constructive culture for writing assessment demands more than a simple familiarity with assessment terms such as validity, reliability, rubrics, or outcomes. Rather, writing faculty and administrators need to know in greater nuance and depth not only contemporary definitions of assessment concepts, but also how these concepts have historically developed.

Our history starts with two competing narratives ...
... about how the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB) was founded. We go on to consider how writing assessment as a field and endeavor has its roots intertwined with the beginnings of intelligence testing. In the larger field of psychological and educational measurement and in its subfield of writing assessment—both of which are about one hundred years old—the notion of reliability received much more attention than validity in the first fifty years or so. This focus on reliability fostered a neglect of the concept of validity. For writing assessment, the concept of reliability has continued to focus primarily on interrater reliability, the ability of two readers to give the same score for the same piece of writing. In educational measurement, however, reliability refers to the consistency of a measure to yield the same results in different administrations. Validity as a concept has received much attention over the last fifty years or so, and Thomas Sabo Jewellery eventually the field has recognized construct validity as a unified concept, including all forms of evidence to make an argument about inferences, interpretations, and decisions made on behalf of a test. This notion of validity is not uncontested, as we shall see, and validity, like all theoretical concepts, continues to evolve.

What is the beginning of writing assessment The Chinese had written examinations over a thousand years ago. In 1840 Horace Mann called for written tests to replace oral examinations in the Boston schools. We could argue, though, that these were written exams but not really a test of writing per se. For that, we probably need to go to Harvard's 1874 instantiation of written exams in English composition for admissions purposes. After these exams, Harvard's English A was established, and Adams Sherman Hill, Wendell Barrett, and their colleagues became some of the first compositionists. This strong relationship between writing assessment and required writing courses supports Peggy O'Neill's contention in Writing Assessment and the Disciplinarity of Composition that writing assessment exerted a strong influence on the creation and development of composition as a field of work and study.