Describes the work of the Literacy Unit of the New Standards Project and uses that description to raise a broader set of issues about assessment in the K-12 English language arts. Notes that the performance assessment uses on-demand tasks lasting three to five days and involves the reading of a selection and writing of an essay and portfolios. (RS)

Washington State University (WSU), has developed two large-scale assessment programs to evaluate student learning outcomes. The largest, the Writing Assessment Program, diagnoses student writing abilities at entry and mid-career to determine the type of support needed to navigate the expectations of our writing-rich curriculum. The second, the…

Accuracy in the scoring of writing is critical if standardized tasks are to be used in a national assessment scheme. Three approaches to establishing accuracy (i.e., consensus, consistency, and measurement) exist and commonly large-scale assessment programs of primary school writing demonstrate adjacent agreement consensus rates of between 80% and…