Assessing children's written texts: a framework for equity

Abstract

In this article, I confine myself to the situation in England that offers a paradigm example of one of the fundamental tensions besetting teaching and assessing writing: the stranglehold of an individualistic view of writing development as opposed to a more socio‐cultural perspective. Examining the uses of summative assessment for accountability purposes and the exclusion of students' multimodal text knowledge and experience, I propose a descriptive framework that can support formative assessment. It encompasses the English national curriculum programmes of study for writing and the associated assessment criteria as well as the features of multimodal texts. Two case studies exemplify using the framework to analyse the writing of students whose accomplishments cannot be fully given value by the current assessment and accountability regime. Finally, I suggest that professional development and respect for professionalism are needed to give teachers the means to reconcile some of the tensions between the urge to teach creatively and imaginatively and their responsibility to their students to cover curricular requirements.

Multimodala bedömningspraktiker och lärares lärande

“…Genom att ta utgångspunkt i e isterande bedömningsaspekter, men utvidgat och anpassat till digitalt och multimodalt te tskapande, sker h r ett n rmande mot den pedagogiska konteten. Beskrivningen kan dels utgöra grund för l rare att utveckla ett språk för att tala om multimodal te t (Bearne 2009a, s. 21), dels fungera för bedömning som v rderar f rdigheter som e kluderas i etablerade bedömningspraktiker (Bearne, 2017). I tidigare artiklar har Bearne utifrån ett socialsemiotiskt perspektiv betonat att ett s tt att tala om multimodala te ter inte bara behöver uppm rksamma olika dimensioner av den multimodala te ten.…”

Identifying Patterns in and Relationships Between Rural Canadian Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children’s Graphic Representations and Their Talk

“…Researchers espousing the stage theory of drawing (e.g., Kellogg, 1969Kellogg, /2015) view children's early marks as a progression from basic scribbles through to early pictorialism, whereas researchers working within a sociocultural perspective consider how meaning is represented through the child's choice of content (e.g., Anning & Ring, 2004) and how content has been organized on paper (e.g., Bearne, 2017;Lancaster, 2007). Young children express their intended meanings visually through structural clues within the drawing, verbally through rich descriptions as they draw, or as announcements once they complete their drawings (Cox, 2005).…”

“…When examining a child's picture, we drew from Anning and Ring (2004) and Bearne (2017), and focused on the content within the picture (e.g., characters, objects) and the child's elaboration of that content. We also noted relational aspects (Lancaster, 2007) such as the size and position of the characters and/or objects within the picture.…”

Readers in the round: children's holistic engagements with texts

“…If some of the gaps are to be bridged between official and unofficial literacies, then adults need to allow children agency in their reading and writing practices and allow time and space for these to occur (Dyson and Dewayani, ), and find ways to recognise how children are understanding the worlds in which they are growing up in (Cremin et al, (). If the gaps are not bridged, then there is a danger that many of the assets children bring will be lost, particularly if the national curriculum leads some schools to feel unable to engage with children's social and cultural contexts (Bearne, ).…”