[NLA] Questions/Discussion: Progress on alternative assessments

[David J. Rosen]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 13:34:57 -0500
From: Inaam Mansoor <IMANSOOR at arlington.k12.va.us>
To: DjRosen at world.std.com
Subject: REEP's Writing Rubric

Hi David,

I am not on the NLA Listserv but word got back to me that there was an
inquiry about our Writing Rubric. you wanted to know what's happening
with it.

We developed a writing rubric and test prompt about 5 years ago to help
us place students into our instructional levels. In recent years, we
were able to develop two additional test prompts in the hopes of
determining whether the instrument could be used for pre and post
assessment of progress in writing. We felt this was important because
higher level ESL students often selected writing as the emphasis for
their instruction.

Through support from WWLP [the What Works Literacy Partnership]
we were able to have researchers analyze our
testing data and I am happy to report that last week, they concluded
that "The Reep Writing Rubric is a carefully designed and validated
instrument with sufficiently high reliability."  They also suggest that
it would be useful to directly compare the writing rubric scores with
standardized tests scores so that the correlation of the rubric with
those standardized tests and the criterion validity of the rubric may be
established once and for all. So I think we will need to do that before
it is rolled out in any major way . I don't think we can do massive
testing using two different writing instruments as is being suggested,
but I am open to perhaps some content analysis between our rubric and
other similar instruments and would welcome the resources to do it.

In the meantime, we continue to use the rubric within our program and
we have done a number of training workshops in the state and at TESOL..
We have integrated it into our assessment procedures at appropriate
levels so that it is used as an instrument to document ongoing progress
as opposed to snapshot assessments pre and post. We will be conducting a
pre-conference "Trainer of Trainer's Institute' at TESOL, so ESL
professionals can take it back to train teachers on their staff. We are
also looking for resources to take our training materials and turn them
into a self study course so individual teachers can learn how to use the
rubric for their classes or program settings.

As you know, we are a large program whose primary focus is on delivery
of instruction to ESL learners, so development of products such as this
is slow going. I hope this information is useful and I encourage anyone
who is interested in learning more about the rubric to attend the
pre-conference institute if they plan to go to TESOL this year.

Inaam
_______________________________________________
NLA mailing list: NLA at lists.literacytent.org
http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/nla
LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
http://literacytent.org