MACE: Medida de Avaliação da Composição Escrita no ensino básico português

Abstract

As a communication and learning system, writing plays a central role in various contexts, and its teaching occurs during several years of schooling. However, writing assessment in Portuguese language lacks validated instruments. Thus, a study of accuracy and validation of the Written Composition Assessment Measure (MACE), a measure of observation built to evaluate the written composition of narrative texts in elementary education, was carried out. A total of 280 students from the 3 rd and 4 th grade of public schools of Lisbon participated in the research. The data collection of 560 narrative texts was performed in two moments, following the same procedure. The results showed a stability of the measurement over time and accuracy in its assessment by different judges. The content validity of MACE and its sensitivity to the level of writing competence were also demonstrated. Implications of the use of the instrument for the written composition evaluation practices were discussed.

Assessing the Efficacy and Social Validity of CriaTivo, a Curriculum-Based Intervention to Promote Self-Regulation of Writing in Portuguese Elementary Education

“…In this study, to test inter-rater reliability, 10% of the texts produced were randomly selected and scored by four independent raters, and the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was calculated for each criterion and total scale (ICC total_scale = .95, range from .81 to .91 within each criterion) indicating an "almost perfect" agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977). Following an exploratory analysis explaining 61.56% of the variance (Oliveira et al, 2019), a confirmatory factor analysis revealed good fit of the model, complying with the literature's cut-off recommendations (Hooper et al, 2008), namely χ 2 = 9.818, p > .05, χ 2 /df = 1.40, CFI = .99, TLI = .99, SRMR = .02, RMSEA = .04.…”

“…Written Composition Assessment Measure (WCAM). The WCAM (Oliveira et al, 2019) was used to assess the mechanical and content-related aspects of the writing quality. The WCAM (ω T1 = .93; ω T2 = .90) was designed on the basis of the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAC-IIUK) and includes analytical measures of both mechanical (e.g., punctuation, grammar, and spelling) and contentrelated (vocabulary, organization, ideas, and overall structure) writing skills (Dunsmuir et al, 2015;Wechsler, 2005).…”