Experimentation in Writing Assessment Management: The Effect and Validity of Expeditious Writing Assessment Approaches

The average English teacher must assess roughly 100 different multi-page essays within a curriculum deadline several times in a school year. Getting these essays graded quickly enough and carefully enough so that both the student and teacher (and administrators and parents) can feel satisfied with the result is a daunting challenge. Exploring the benefits of reading student essays more quickly is one possible route toward solving this dilemma. It is sensible to explore the potential upside of simply reading more quickly in writing assessment before trying any other solution methods. If there seems to be little detriment and marked benefits to this practice, the result is a simple, cost-efficient solution to a major problem in writing assessment. This study highlights the advantages and disadvantages of grading more quickly during writing assessment. The research methodology in this study is three-fold. In the first phase, twelve English teacher-participants are broken into three groups of four and asked to grade the same small stack of randomly-selected student samples in accordance with varying time-conscious grading definitions. The second phase is the collection of the data and narrative responses from all participants. The final phase involves reporting, analyzing, and interpreting the quantitative and qualitative grade results of each of the three grading groups. The population from which writing samples were drawn for this study is the host site school's eleventh grade diagnostic NJHSPA expository writing task1. Likewise, all participants used the NJHSPA holistic scoring rubric2 as their primary assessment resource. The anticipated result prior to the execution of this study is that there would be negligible differences between the "slower" and "quicker" participant assessment groups across the stack of writing samples. Furthermore, the study aims to prove that extra time spent by educators who assess writing carefully and often does not necessarily lead to more valid grading. The sentiment of the primary investigator of this study is that reading more quickly while assessing writing can be a meaningful, relevant, and certainly timely assessment strategy that can help inform and guide student learning. There is a strong hope that the results of this study will help English teachers and all educators who are heavily engaged in writing assessment approach this highly stressful, yet very important task more comfortably.;1See p.27, Appendix U, or http://www.state.nj.us/education/assessment/hs/ExpositoryWritingPrompt.pdf 2See p.27, Appendix T, or http://www.state.nj.us/education/assessment/hs/ExpositoryWritingPrompt.pdf...