The Future of Education

Writing assessment has been regarded as one of the most important tasks that writing teachers should implement. However, many teachers reported that they were not adequately trained on scoring students’ compositions or giving feedback to them during their teacher training courses. Considering that writing assessment requires much time, effort and professional training, preservice teachers need to prepare relevant writing assessment literacy. Nevertheless, there is not sufficient concern for investigating preservice teachers’ actual performance of writing assessment except for a few studies. As part of the research project to investigate and improve preservice teachers’ writing assessment literacy, the current pilot study was designed as a mixed-methods study to confirm the status of preservice teachers’ writing assessment skills by examining their actual performance of scoring students’ written texts and their awareness on conducting the assessment. To this end, 40 preservice teachers participated in the study and scored the written outputs from middle school students. They conducted analytic scoring in terms of the existing rubric with four sub-categories and wrote a self-report on their experience. A qualitative content analysis technique was employed to analyse their self-report. The nature of difficulties that preservice teachers felt and the factors that affect the reliability of scoring will be discussed. By offering some empirical grounds, these results will act as a basis for the larger research project which aims to develop a preservice teacher training program.

Keywords: Writing assessment, Teacher education, Preservice teachers, Analytic scoring.

References:

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