curriculum and assessment

the professional responsibilities of assessment

Assessing students’ work is one of your main responsibilities as an English teacher. Sometimes this will feel like a chore – English teachers, in particular, carry a heavy marking load because of the nature of the tasks they set. Short answer questions or tick-the-box exercises hardly ever provide an adequate means to test the knowledge and skills associated with subject English, and English teachers have rightly objected to an excessive reliance on standardised testing to assess the reading and writing skills of their students. (See Doecke, Reynolds and Roberts (2002). Standardised Testing: What space for professional judgment?

English teachers generally prefer to make judgements about a student’s language and literacy abilities on the basis of continuous classrooms observations and other evidence such as the drafting and editing of various types of writing. This means they often spend a great deal of time in ongoing conversation with their students about their writing, providing thoughtful responses to drafts to help them clarify their focus or enliven their style, and then reaching considered judgements about the quality of the final product.

This idea of an ongoing conversation with students about their work hearks back to the term ‘process writing’, an approach to the teaching of writing which first became popular in primary and secondary schools in Australia in the later 1970s and early 1980s. Advocates of process writing argued the importance of enabling students to discuss drafts of their writing with their peers and their teacher (i.e. to ‘conference’ their writing). Click on the links to the read the first parts of chapters written by Brian Johnston and Douglas McClenaghan. Here, Johnson and McClenaghan discuss the different ways in which they implemented ‘conferencing’ in secondary classrooms. (The full chapters can be found in Responding to Students’ Writing: Continuing conversations, Norwood, SA: AATE. Monash users may access PDFs of all chapters by clicking here.

See Frances Christie’s article in Responding to Students’ Writing (Doecke, 1999) for a critique of some of the basic tenets of ‘process writing’



	"What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination... Professor Julius Sumner Miller, 1992