Tompkins, Ch. 4 -1: Assessing Children’s Writing

“Assessing writing involves more than just looking at pieces of writing; instead, teachers should focus on the writers themselves (Anderson, 2005, as cited in Tomkins, 2008, p. 76). I take that the writing assessment includes both an ongoing process and a product, not limited to assigning a score to a finalized product. As a formative assessment, “Process assessment is designed to probe how children write, the decisions they make as writers, and the strategies they use, rather than the quality of their finished products” (Tomkins, 2008, p. 81). To present a more complete picture of the multiple dimensions of writing and the growth of a student as a writer, meaningful evaluation should involve both a teacher and a student as well. Among a range of process and product measures, I highly value assessment conferences, self-assessment, and portfolios as excellent tools for alternative and authentic evaluation of writing. “Shared responsibility for evaluation is, in effect, also conductive to the democratic development of language teaching” (Oskarsson, 1998, p. 21). Most importantly, to facilitate the positive effect of authentic forms of evaluation, we, educators, should make endeavor to skillfully weave course designing, instructional lesson planning, developing writing tasks and assignment into feedback process and evaluation.

Response to Miyoung Noh

Miyoung rightly emphasized the importance of balance in assessments in writing instructions. I agree that focusing only one or two aspects of wring will fail to gauge the full potential of the students as a writer. "Teachers should use a variety of assessments: formal and informal, snapshot and whole-piece, process and product, and timed and untimed’. Writing can be cognitively demanding and emotionally excruciating as well. If the students get to equate the quality of writing with the scores or grade they get on their writing, they might develop a habit of safe writing, not taking risks to be more creative. As such obsessions with grades are likely to produce a potentially crippling writing phobia. Thus, employing a range of assessments at various phases of writing process is crucial. After all, we want our students to have confidence to translate their thoughts and feeling into language freely and creatively.      

   

Sources

Oskarsson, M. (1988). Self-assessment of language proficiency: Rationale
         and applications. Paper read at the tenth annual language testing
            research colloquium, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
         March 1998.

Tompkins, Gail E. (2008). Teaching writing: Balancing process and
           product. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.