Development of the asTTle Writing Assessment Rubrics for Scoring ...

2 Glasswell, K., Parr, J., & Aikman, M.writing, and numeracy. They are also designedto allow teachers to compare their students withothers using the norms for the assessment tasksselected. These tools can be used when andwhere schools or classroom teachers wish andas often as they find useful. Thus, the task wasto develop rubrics within this context to servesuch purposes.Where assessment is to serve the function ofinforming teaching practice and, subsequently,improving individual students’ learning, suchtools have to be designed with close attentionboth to notions of developmental progressionand to contextual factors. Contextual factorsinclude the present state of knowledge in thefield of written composition and its assessment;the mandated curriculum; the skills in, trainingin, ideas about, and goals for literacy learningheld by teachers doing the assessment;psychometric concerns for sound assessment;and more pragmatic considerations such as theorganisational practices of those who will usethe rubrics. The task was to develop rubricsthat would both reflect and construct teachers’expertise in teaching writing as well as inassessing it.Recent approaches to assessing writingappear to reflect the broader debate about genreversus context. The view that acquiringexpertise in writing is the acquisition of ageneric set of processes that could be appliedacross all writing tasks is reflected in theassessment rubrics developed (e.g., the Six-Trait Analytic Writing Assessment Model,Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory,1998). Functional genre theorists (e.g., Martin,Christie, & Rothery, 1987) emphasise thedefinable text features common across variouscontexts. Social process theorists (e.g.,Berkenkotter, 1993; Chapman, 1999; Freedman& Medway, 1994) argue that genres are highlycontext dependent and that writers access themfor particular social purposes. The theoreticalstance informing our development of scoringrubrics is that writing is a purposeful socialinteraction that can function to accomplishcertain social goals. Further, features of textsare related to the purposes of and contexts forwriting, so scoring rubrics need to reflect this.Although there are differing ways ofclassifying the functions of writing, there tendsto be considerable overlap among the systemsof various authors (e.g., Derewianka, 1990;Knapp & Watkins, 1994; Wing Jan, 1991; Wray& Lewis, 1999). Informed by research – butalso keeping in mind the New Zealand nationalcurriculum, where writing (after Britton,Burgess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975) isseen to serve three broad functions: expressive,transactional, and poetic – we viewed writing asserving six major functions or processes (afterKnapp & Watkins, 1994). These are: toexplain; to argue or persuade; to instruct or layout a procedure; to classify, organise, describe,and report information; to inform and entertainthrough imaginative narrative; and to informand entertain through recount. This was thetheoretical stance and resulting framework forthe development of the scoring rubrics.Thus, the choice we made was to follow theconceptualisation of genre as driven byfunctional purpose (Gerot & Wignell, 1994;Martin, 1985) rather than by mode (text form).Even in this choice, we hope there will beramifications for professional development ofteachers. In some teachers’ texts, there appearsto be a certain measure of confusion betweenfunction and mode or text form; indeed, somewriters seem to view them as synonymous. Forexample, in the research that preceded thisreport (Limbrick, Girven, & Keenan, 2000), thetask was to map the New Zealand Englishcurriculum. Under the heading “WritingStrategies” was the aim derived from English inthe New Zealand Curriculum (ENZC) (Ministryof Education, 1994) – namely, to “demonstrateability to record experiences, events, feelingsand ideas in a range of text forms usingappropriate language and text features” (p. 9 indraft). Listed under this aim (see Appendix 1,p. 7) was a mixture of both functions such as torecount, to argue, or to list a procedure and texttypes such as a letter, a diary, or a play.Further confusion over the blurring ofdistinction between text form and function isapparent in classroom practice. Many NewZealand teachers, for example, teach theirchildren how to structure letters in the beliefthat this will be helpful information for them as