The document discusses best practices for testing writing ability. It recommends that tests require students to write rather than answer indirect questions. Effective writing tests should (1) use representative writing tasks, (2) elicit valid samples of students' writing skills, and (3) reliably score the writing samples. Representative tasks means the test covers a range of content and text types. Valid samples are obtained by including separate writing tasks that test only writing ability. Reliable scoring is achieved through holistic or analytic scoring scales applied to long writing samples.
The document discusses best practices for testing writing ability. It recommends that tests require students to write rather than answer indirect questions. Effective writing tests should (1) use representative writing tasks, (2) elicit valid samples of students' writing skills, and (3) reliably score the writing samples. Representative tasks means the test covers a range of content and text types. Valid samples are obtained by including separate writing tasks that test only writing ability. Reliable scoring is achieved through holistic or analytic scoring scales applied to long writing samples.
The document discusses best practices for testing writing ability. It recommends that tests require students to write rather than answer indirect questions. Effective writing tests should (1) use representative writing tasks, (2) elicit valid samples of students' writing skills, and (3) reliably score the writing samples. Representative tasks means the test covers a range of content and text types. Valid samples are obtained by including separate writing tasks that test only writing ability. Reliable scoring is achieved through holistic or analytic scoring scales applied to long writing samples.
The best way to test people’s writing ability is to get
them to write. Indirect writing is not suggested, even by the professional testing institutions. The first step is to state the testing problem. 1. Set writing tasks that are properly representative of the population of tasks that we should expect the students to be able to perform. 2. The tasks should elicit valid samples of writing (which truly represent the students’ ability) 3. The sample of writing will be scored validly and reliably. Testing Writing Based on the problem statement of writing test, three areas should be given concentration: 1. Representative Tasks 2. Eliciting a Valid Sample of Writing Ability 3. Ensure Valid and Reliable Scoring Testing Writing Representative Tasks: 1. Specify all possible content – operations, types of text, addressees of texts, topics, dialect and length of texts. 2. Include a representative sample of the specified content. Testing Writing
Elicit a Valid Sample of Writing Ability:
1. Set as many separate tasks as is feasible 2. Test only writing ability, and nothing else 3. Restrict candidates Testing Writing Ensure Valid and Reliable Scoring: 1. Set tasks which can be reliably scored 2. Set as many tasks as possible 3. Restrict candidate 4. Give no choice of tasks 5. Ensure long enough samples 6. Create appropriate scales for scoring 7. Holistic scoring 8. Analytic scoring