Assessing Written Communication in Higher Education: Review and Recommendations for Next‐Generation Assessment

Abstract

Written communication is considered one of the most critical competencies for academic and career success, as evident in surveys of stakeholders from higher education and the workforce. Emphasis on writing skills suggests the need for next‐generation assessments of writing proficiency to inform curricular and instructional improvement. This article presents a comprehensive review of definitions of writing proficiency from key higher education and workforce frameworks; the strengths and weaknesses of existing assessments; and challenges related to designing, implementing, and interpreting such assessments. Consistent with extant frameworks, we propose an operational definition including 4 strands of skills: (a) social and rhetorical knowledge, (b) domain knowledge and conceptual strategies, (c) language use and conventions, and (d) the writing process. Measuring these aspects of writing requires multiple assessment formats (including selected‐response [SR] and constructed‐response [CR] tasks) to balance construct coverage and test reliability. Next‐generation assessments should balance authenticity (e.g., realistic writing tasks) and psychometric quality (e.g., desirable measurement properties), while providing institutions and faculty with actionable data. The review and operational definition presented here should serve as an important resource for institutions that seek to either adopt or design an assessment of students' writing proficiency.

A Historical Survey of Research Regarding Constructed-Response Formats

“…Specifically, the importance of the role of "fluency" in writing was beginning to emerge (C. W. Taylor 1947) well within the psychometric camp. Today, the assessment of writing is informed by a view of writing as a "complex integrated skill" (Deane et al 2008;Sparks et al 2014) with fluency as a key subskill. By today's standards, the scope of the concept of reliability was not fully developed in the 1930s and 1940s in the sense of understanding the components of unreliability.…”

Assessment for Learning Within and Beyond the Classroom

“…Effective writing, an essential aspect of student learning outcome in higher education, is viewed as an important intellectual skill and is essential for academic and career success (Hasegawa 2013;Lee 2013;Lee et al 2014a, b;Sparks et al 2014). …”

Assessment of oral and written communication competences in the European Higher Education Area: a proposal of evaluation methodologies

“…This paper presents some results obtained in the frame of an innovative project (PIME program) on the evaluation of three generic competences that have been traditionally worked within subjects of mechanical and materials engineering: capacity for problem analysis; capacity for applying knowledge in practice; and communication skills, using name convention from Tuning (2014) (http://www.unideusto.org/tuningeu/). In particular, in this work some methodologies for the analysis of the skills in oral and written communication have been developed (Sparks, Song, Brantley, & Liu, 2014;Dunbar, Brooks, & Kibicka-Miller, 2006). The aim is to obtain reliable information in order to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the students in the communication competences (Jonsson & Svingby, 2007).…”