Asian Association for Language Assessment

Writing and language abilities are so multi-faceted and variable that  construct models for their assessment are necessarily partial  representations of the full construct, designed to fulfill particular  purposes of assessment in specific contexts (supported by varying  degrees of validation and research). Assessment purposes are either normative (comparing on a common scale all people who take a test, usually for  decisions about admission to educational programs, certification of  professional abilities, or monitoring an educational system); formative (to inform teaching and learning for individual diagnosis, program selection, guidance, or motivation); or summative (to document and report achievement within educational programs). These  purposes overlap and are easily confused in educational practices and  policies because institutions want assessments to serve multiple  functions and stakeholders. Exemplary writing assessments can be  designed to fulfill multiple purposes systematically, as in ETS' CBAL  project—assessment of, for, and as learning. But most writing assessments for educational purposes remain  limited to certain educational programs, populations, points in the  lifespan, languages, genres, and purposes for writing (cf. Hornberger's  2003 model of biliteracy). For these reasons, the design, uses, and  evaluation of writing assessments in education should make a fundamental  distinction between purposes that either are normative (so should not  in principle relate to any particular curricula or teaching) or are  formative and summative (which should be based directly on and inform  curricula, teaching, and learning). To borrow a metaphor from the design  of computer systems, "purposing…reduces the number and complexity of  steps required to deploy and configure a data center server" (Microsoft,  2016).