Does indirect writing assessment have any relevance to direct writing assessment? Focus on validity and reliability
Abstract
The present paper, which is a study based on midterm exam results of 53 University English prep-school students, examines correlation between a direct writing test, measured holistically by multiple-trait scoring, and two indirect writing tests used in a competence exam, one of which is a multiple-choice cloze test and the other a rewrite test measured on the sentence grammar scale. The purpose of the study is to compare and analyse the results obtained from the use of these distinct strategies in writing assessment and to see to what extent they are of value to account for the students’ writing skills and in what areas they can offer validity and reliability in diagnostic terms as well as investigating whether any quantitative correlations exist between the choice of topics and the level of achievement in essay-writing, in which the choice of topic also implied the choice of a particular rhetoric to be used as part of the essay writing task.
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