Essay Assessment Tasks

Chapter 9Tests and MeasurementPresented by Patti Wyatt

• Are essay items better to use to assess higher order thinking skills such as synthesis and evaluation?

• Are there different strategies for crafting essay prompts when the main purpose is to assess students’ writing ability rather than their subject matter knowledge?

• This chapter focuses on helping you learn the fundamentals of crafting quality essay items.

Restricted Response Varieties

• Essay items which restrict or limit both the content of students’ answers and the form of their written responses. This is done by the way you phrase a restricted response task.

• Restricted response items should require students to apply their skills to solve new problems or to analyze novel situations.

Advantages of Restricted Response

• Narrows the focus of your assessment to a specific and well defined performance.

• The nature of these items makes it more likely that your students will interpret each question the way you intended.

• Puts you in a better position to assess the correctness of student answers when a question is focused and all students interpret it in the same way.

Extended Response Varieties

• Essay items requiring students to write essays in which they are free to express their own ideas and interrelationships among their ideas and to use their own organization of their answers.

• The two broad uses for the extended response essay format are to assess students’ (a) general writing ability and (b) subject matter knowledge.

General Writing Ability Essay

• If your intention is to assess only writing ability, your essay must present the students with a prompt.

• You evaluate students’ performance by using a scoring rubric that defines various characteristics or qualities of writing.

Subject-Matter Knowledge Essay

• If your primary purpose is to evaluate students’ knowledge, understanding, and reasoning in a subject ,then a different kind of prompt and essay structure is needed.

• In Bloom’s Taxonomy, one aspect of synthesis is the ability to formulate a plan of action for a particular purpose. The example essay requires just that.

Advantages of Extended Response Essays

• Suited to assessing learning targets that require students to use a combination of skills such as interpreting material, solving a problem, and explaining the problem and its solution coherently.

Disadvantages of Extended Response Essays

• Poor scoring reliability—it is difficult to score an extended response objectively.

• Teachers evaluate different students’ essays using different criteria.

• Time-consuming to score, especially if you want to give feedback to students so they can improve their learning.

Usefulness of Essay Assessments

• Offers students the opportunity to display their abilities to write about, to organize, to express, and to explain inter-relationships among ideas.

• If crafted correctly, you will encourage higher-order thinking skills. Ask the students to give reasons or explain their choices.

• Remember, to improve the content coverage of their assessment, many teachers use both essay and objective test items.

• Several out-of-class essays written over a marking period may better assess a particular learning target than a single essay written during a brief examination period.

Essay Scoring Ethics

• Scoring essays carelessly is a breach of professional ethics and an abuse of responsibility.

• Assessing and evaluating students is serious business. Plan carefully when deciding to include the essay format in an assessment.

• Well defined criteria should be used to evaluate students’ essay responses and should be taught and explained to students.

• Teachers should engage in professional development designed to give clarification of statements of state standards and what the characteristics of quality performance are and, through examples, learn what quality performance looks like.

What are the characteristics of good writing?

• Educators differ as to what constitutes good student writing.

• Use the writing traits your state has adopted.

NCTE Position on Teaching and Assessing Writing

SIX TRAIT ANALYTIC WRITING MODEL

 

Using Scoring Rubrics

• Analytic Scoring Rubric—requires you to evaluate specific dimensions, traits or elements of a student’s response. Requires that you use an outline of the ideal answer. You decide the number of points to award to students when they include each element.

• Holistic Scoring Rubric—requires you to make a judgment about the overall quality or of each student’s response. It is probably more appropriate for extended response subject-matter essays involving a student’s abilities to synthesize and create when no single correct answer can be prespecified. States that do large-scale assessment of either writing or subject-matter essay responses often prefer holistic scoring.

Rubistar

Summary of Principles for scoring responses to subject-matter essay items

1. Prepare some type of scoring guide.

2. Grade all responses to one question before moving on to the next question.

3. Periodically rescore previously scored papers.

4. Score penmanship, general neatness, spelling, use of prescribed format, and English mechanics separately from subject-matter correctness.

5. Score papers without knowing the name of the pupil writing the response.

6. Provide pupils with feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of their responses.

7. When the grading decision is crucial, have two or more readers score the essays independently.