Session Information
09 SES 03 B, Assessing Spelling and Written Composition
Paper Session
Contribution
Since 2011 the students of the northern United Arab Emirates, have been assessed in a number of key domains in a national assessment program (UAENAP) at four Grade levels; Grade 3, Grade 5, Grade 7 and Grade 9.
The domain of Arabic Writing has been assessed through students attempting a Narrative task which is scored by trained local teachers against a detailed criterion-based marking rubric. The students’ work is rated against multiple individual criteria thereby promoting a system of fair objective marking and a wide range of scores compared to the traditional holistic single-score method. The discrete areas of Relevance, Narrative Features, Organisation, Cohesion, Vocabulary, Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling; are atomised and scored on a range of zero to up to five points, thereby giving a concise and detailed profile of a student’s ability in Arabic Writing. The same task is administered to all four Grade levels and one common rubric consistently applied to all student writing responses irrespective of grade.
This diagnostic information is reported back to all the key stakeholders and allows jurisdictions to observe any trends across cohorts; principals to observe patterns across the grade levels; teachers to identify issues at class and student levels; and finally and perhaps most importantly, parents to closely monitor their own child’s performance in Arabic Writing.
The introduction of online marking in 2012, replaced the paper-based marking approach used in the inaugural year.
This paper reports an investigation of the impact of the introduction of criterion-based marking of student writing in relation to the participating markers’ attitudes and practices and how these translate to assessing writing in their own classroom.
It will look at the reported influence of criterion-based marking on participating teacher pedagogy at student, teacher and school levels.
Two sources of data will be used to investigate the research question. The first source will be based on the aggregation of student data by Grade and class at school level. The second source will be teacher questionnaires regarding attitudes towards criterion-based marking and the manner in which their experiences in the marking centre have impacted on their pedagogy.
The data gathered from the three iterations of the marking of student work in Arabic Writing, namely 2011, 2012 and 2013; will be compared in conjunction with the data from the teacher questionnaires regarding their implementation of new strategies within the classroom. The UAENAP program allows for a student to be tracked over time and growth within this domain measured against the UAENAP writing scale.
This investigation will inform the UAE Ministry of Education and other key stakeholders of the potential impact of the wider scale introduction of criterion-based pedagogy on the development and assessment of student writing.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
•Green, S. (2002). Criterion referenced Assessment as a Guide to Learning – The Importance of Progression and Reliability. A paper presented at the Association for the Study of Evaluation in Education in Southern Africa International Conference, 10 July – 12 July 2002 •Master, G.N. (1988). The Analysis of Partial Credit. Applied Measurement in Education, 1(4), 279-297. Copyright 1988, Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. •Wu, M.L., Adams, R.J., Wilson, M.R., Haldane, S.A. (2007). ACER ConQuest Version 2: Generalised item response modelling software [computer program]. Camberwell: Australian Council for Educational Research.
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