Writing education and assessment in Norway: Towards shared understanding, shared language and shared responsibility

Abstract

This article reports on a study of writing and assessment in upper primary school, focusing on how teachers develop assessment competence through professional discussions in interdisciplinary groups. The empirical data consist of dialogues between teachers assessing and giving feedback on students' texts from different subjects. To support their evaluations, the teachers used and referred to a defined construct of writing and norms for expected writing proficiency. The analyses reveal a complex picture of the teachers' use of the assessment resources and their processes of appropriating a broader understanding of writing, including acquiring an extended meta-language. Three thematic categories are crystallised: an instrumental approach and a flexible and functional approach, appearing as two ideal typical points on a continuum, linked together by an overarching category labelled learning in progress. The article argues for an analytical reading as a basis for formative assessment in general writing education, and points to the need for knowledge on writing, text and linguistics -traditionally seen as domains for L1 teachers. The findings are discussed in light of the L1 teachers' responsibility for both the specific subject discourses of literacy and Bildung, and for providing students with general knowledge on language and text to support their overall writing competence. Critical implications of this double responsibility for the L1 subject are presented and reflected upon.

Teachers as raters: Investigation of a long term writing assessment program

“…This includes rater background (Leckie & Baird, 2011;Lim, 2011), rater cognition (Baker, 2012;Eckes, 2012;Zhang, 2016), and rater values and expectations (Baker, 2010). For example, studies have shown a general lack of grammatical metalanguage among teachers, making it difficult both for students to learn to write (Myhill, Jones, & Watson, 2013) and for teachers to discuss and assess student texts (e.g., Matre & Solheim, 2015, 2016. Research on rater decision-making has revealed a tendency for raters to pay insufficient attention to the common framework with which they are presented and to value more highly their own, individually held, and often tacit assessment practices (e.g., Wyatt-Smith, Klenowski, & Gunn, 2010;Jølle, 2014).…”

Students as researchers: What and why seventh‐grade students choose to write when investigating their own research question

“…However, this framework and these labels were chosen to highlight the starting phase of writing, not to cover all the purposes a text can serve at different stages of the process. Our understanding is therefore narrower, for instance, than the one defined in the wheel of writing as knowledge development and exchange of information (Matre & Solheim, ) or understood in context as the intention behind an action (Halliday & Matthiessen, ).…”

Lärares samtal om elevers skrivande av berättande texter i tidiga skolår

“…Ett exempel på detta är det norska NORM-projektet (Berge, Skar, Matre, Solheim, Evensen et al, 2017). Här visas att lärares bedömningar fördjupas när de har tillgång till gemensamma bedömningsnormer baserade i ett professionellt metaspråk (Matre & Solheim, 2015). Men inte heller i de sju värderingsområden som utgör normer inom NORM-projektet lyfts några berättartekniska aspekter fram.…”