NTIDR B Writing Assessment continued on page 3 Vol.8 No.3 Spring 2003 Writing Assessment: Tools for Teachers and Writers By Sara Schley and John Albertini As educators and researchers, we give writing tests to measure achievement, to place students in appropriate courses, and to diagnose strengths and weaknesses. Whatever their purpose, students rarely make a connection between writing tests and learning how to write well. Indeed many instructors view testing—especially “high stakes” testing—as an impediment to meaningful, effective instruction. The terms grades, tests, and assessment are so often used interchangeably that many in the profession believe “that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it” (Huot, 2002, p.163). In this report we describe recent research on a writing test used with deaf college students and suggest ways in which this test may connect to the teaching, or better yet, learning of writing. The assessment of writing In the US in the 1960’s, the best predictor of teachers’ ratings of writing quality was grammatical correctness (Stuckless & Marks, 1966). Formal assessment of deaf students’ writing followed a writing curriculum that focused almost exclusively on the production of grammatically correct sentences and the choice of appropriate vocabulary (Albertini & Schley, 2003). However, as the teaching of writing expanded beyond a focus on sentence-level grammatical correctness, so too did the scope of what was assessed. Current tests, depending on their purpose, may also include content and such rhetorical attributes as focus, voice, and organization. Today, writing skill is most often assessed in one of three ways: directly, as in essay tests; indirectly, as in multiple-choice tests; or longitudinally, as in portfolios. In essay tests a sample of writing is elicited and scored according to pre-established criteria. In multiple-choice tests, students are asked to select among grammatical and stylistic alternatives. In portfolio assessments, a collection of writing samples from a term or school year are rated and also assessed descriptively. The selection of appropriate assessment method depends on a range of factors, not least among which are considerations of fairness for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and of the accountability of educational programs that certify these students. These issues are at the heart of educators’ concerns about high stakes testing and deaf students. The possibility exists that under increased pressure to show gains on standardized tests across school dis- tricts, standards of validity and reliability for special populations will be overlooked or compromised. With an increase in the number of deaf students entering postsecondary institutions in the United States, indirect multiple-choice tests (for example, The Written English Expression Placement Test, 1985) are frequently used for placement in reading and writing courses. Is this a fair and appropriate choice, given that such tests target skills known to be difficult for deaf students: the recognition of writing conventions and correct usage? Also, the tests involve significant amounts of reading (Berent et al., 1996) Another approach and one that has been used for several years at NTID to place students in developmental writing courses is a holistic rating of C-Print project members from the Department of Research, Michael Stinson, Pamela Francis, and Gina Coyne, made three invited presentations in Washington, DC, in September. The first two, on the C-Print speech-to-text system for support of communication access and learning, were to staff at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and at the OSERS Technology Project Director’s Conference. The presentations included demonstration of the recently developed C-Print® Pro user interface software. This specialized software produces real-time text through automatic speech recognition and/or a computerized keyboard- based abbreviation system. The software has computer networking capabilities and displays for the captionist (host) and student (client) computers, enabling students to participate in class discussion, to highlight the text produced by the captionist, and to Notes of Note Notes of Note continued on page 3 Sara Schley is an assistant professor in the Department of Research at NTID. John Albertini is a professor in the Department of Research at NTID. Department of Research . National Technical Institute for the Deaf . Rochester Institute of Technology