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Assessment in a Culture of Inquiry: The Story of the National Writing Project's Analytic Writing Continuum
By: Sherry Swain, Paul LeMahieu
Publication: Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White
Date: July 31, 2012
Summary: Assessment and education are often inextricably linked, so why is it that teachers usually find themselves without a voice when it comes to discussing what goes into the former? Sherry Swain, Senior Research Associate with the National Writing Project, and Paul LeMahieu, Vice President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, study the results of the NWP's Analytic Writing Continuum, which offered an opportunity to explore the potential of assessment beyond a standard.
The Analytic Writing Continuum
NWP's Analytic Writing Continuum was developed by a team of expert teachers of writing as well as experts in the field of writing assessment. The continuum features a six point scale for each of its six attributes: content, structure, stance, sentence fluency, diction, and conventions. Assessing Writing, Teaching Writers explains the design of the AWC and features detailed instructions for helping teachers to understand and use it as a scoring guide and instructional tool. Download the AWC (PDF)
More info on Hampton Press
Related Resources on NWP.org
Excerpt from Article
Teachers, the heart of education, too often find themselves excluded from the very process that policymakers advise should be central to instruction, namely assessment. Across this country, K–12 faculty groups gather regularly for sessions on "data driven" instruction. They pour through pages of statistical materials, and then they go back to their classrooms and do what they've always done: the very best they can with the information they have. What's missing in this picture? We suggest that what's missing is the teacher's involvement in assessment in any meaningful way: helping to design it, learning from it, and using it to improve instruction.
This is the story of how teachers thinking together with writing assessment experts helped to create a technically sound and rigorous writing assessment, one that is useful in the classroom as well as in research. The system diminishes the conundrum described by White: that often teachers feel "forced to choose between tailoring their teaching to an impromptu test and helping their students learn to write . . ." (2007, p. iv). At the center of this story is a cohesive educational community, imbued with a vital inquiry stance, that developed, investigated, refined, and expanded the uses of the assessment system over an extended period of time. The Analytic Writing Continuum (AWC), developed by the National Writing Project (NWP), offers an opportunity to explore the potential of assessment that is locally contextualized yet linked to a common national framework and standards of performance.
Copyright © Hampton Press. Reprinted with permission.
Swain, Sherry and Paul G. LeMahieu. 2012. "Assessment in a Culture of Inquiry: The Story of the National Writing Project's Analytic Writing Continuum." In Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White, edited by Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, 45-66. New York: Hampton Press.
Related Downloads
Download "The Analytic Writing Continuum (PDF)"
Download "Assessment in a Culture of Inquiry: The Story of the National Writing Project's Analytic Writing Continuum"
