by Steve Graham, Karen Harris, and Michael Hebert
Examines the effectiveness of formative writing assessment and identifies best practices in writing assessment. Recommendations include the following:
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Use Formative Writing Assessment To Enhance Students' Writing. Writing improves when teachers...
- Provide feedback to improve student writing.
- Teach students how to assess their own writing.
- Monitor students' writing progress on an ongoing basis.
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Apply Best Practices For Assessing Writing In The Classroom
- Allow students to use the mode of writing in which they are most proficient when completing a writing assessment —pencil/paper or word processing.
- Minimize the extent to which handwriting legibility or computer printing bias judgments of writing quality.
- Mask the writer's identify when scoring papers.
- Randomly order students' papers before scoring them.
- Collect multiple samples of students' writing.
- Ensure that classroom writing assessments are reliably scored.
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