ESSAY FORMAT

Different forms of essay format
short response answer to extended response answer.
 Essay writing at SPM level are divided into two parts:

ü  Directed writing    - provides structure to the students and expects the students to write according to the prompts given

ü  Continous writing - expects the students to draw upon their experience and past knowledge as well as knowledge of writing conventions.

Advantages of the essay format

·         can assess higher order skills

ü  students are able to analyse,synthesis and evaluate through topics that require students to argue or express their opinions.

·         emphasises communication skills

ü  important aspect in social relations

·         eliminates guessing

ü  unlikely to occur in essay because students need to provide more ideas on their own.

·         relatively easy to construct

ü  within few minutes,the questions are easy to construct rather than constructing other  test  formats.

Disadvantages of the essay format

·         can only test a limited amount of content if compared to multiple choice type questions.

·         prone to bluffing by the students.

ü  repeating the same idea so that the teacher will be impressed by the length of essay.

·         essays tend to be less reliable than other test format.

ü  different graders have different impressions of a single essay.

ü  help the students by providing clear guidelines.

·         essays are difficult to score.

ü  consume more times to grade the students essay as you need to decide which scoring approach to use.

Approaches to scoring essay

·         there are three major approaches to scoring essays which is :

ü  holistic scoring

v  readers react to the students' composition as a whole and and a single score is awarded to the writing

v  The rank would be from 1-6.

v  example:

1	2	3	4	5	6
Vocab is precise,vivid and varied	Vocab is adequate for grade level	Vocab is simple	Vocab is limited and repetitions	Respond with few isolated words	No response
Meaning is conveyed easily	Meaning is conveyed but break down at times	Meaning is frequently not clear	Meaning is unclear	No complete sentences are written	No response
Transition from one idea to another idea is smooth and provides readers with clear understanding.	Some transitions of idea is evident	There are few transition markers or repetitive transition markers	No transitions markers	No evidence of concepts of  writing	No response
A few mechanical errors are present but there are no disrupts in communication	Mechanical errors are present but does not disrupt the communication	Mechanical errors disrupt communication	Mechanical errors cause serious disruption in communication.	-	No response

v  primary trait scoring are related to holistic scoring because primary trait scoring focuses on certain functional criteria based on the purpose of the writing and the grade will be given based on how well the students are able to express that function.

ü  analytical scoring

v  raters access students'performance on a variety of categorieswhich are hypothesised to make up the skill of writing.

v  some possible contents used in assessing writing ability using an analytic scoring:

      Content

      organisation

      language use

      vocabulary

      mechanics

ü  objective scoring

v  this approach relies on the quantified methods of evaluating students writing.

v  this scoring will be conducted by :

      establish standardization by limiting the length of the assessment.

      identify the elements to be assessed-go through the essay up to 250 words and highlight all the mistakes from spelling to mechanics.

      operationalise the assessment-assign a weight score for each mistake range from 1-3.

      Quantify the assessment- 250 (words) = 3.52 correctness score

                                               71 (sum of errors)

Comparison of three approaches

Holistic Scoring	Advantages	Disadvantages
	·         quickly graded ·         provide a public standard that is understood by the teachers and students alike ·         relatively higher degree of rater reliability ·         applicable to the assessment of many different topics. ·         emphasise the students strength rather than their weakness.	·         the single score can actually mask the differences across students compositions. ·         does not provide a lot of diagnostic feedback.
Analytical Scoring	·         provides clear guidelines in grading in the form of various components. ·         allow the graders to consciously address important aspects of  writing.	·         writing ability is unmaturally split up into components.
Objective in scoring	·         objectivity in scoring ·         grading a paper can be stopped and resumed with ease even after a period of time as the consistency or reliability of scoring is maintained.	·         still some degree of subjectivity is involved. ·         accentuates negative aspects of the learners writing without giving credit for what they can do well.

Ensuring accurate scoring of essays

Familiarisation with scale

·         familiarisation is important to achieve a valid and accurate scores.

·         graders should be familiar with  the scoring criteria so that the if bands are involved,they would know what does each band requires.

Identifying benchmark papers

·         this step is to provide a clear and representative example of students work according to the grading criteria.

·         Bands can only provide general description of what is expected meanwhile benchmark papers provide concrete examples and help ensure fairness in grading.

Grading

·         Norming

ü  papers are stacked together and divided according to the band

ü  read each paper more closely and state our first impression

·         Final Grades

ü  when we need to assign more precise numerical scores

ü  grade all students on one essay first before moving on to the next essay in order to ensure more consistent grading.