A Procedure for Writing Content-Fair Essay Examination Topics for Large-Scale Writing Assessments

Abstract

In the past few years, as performance tests of writing ability have become increasingly prominent parts of large-scale educational assessment programs, researchers have finally begun to study the effects of variations in essay test characteristics on the nature and quality of students' writing samples. 1 Several recent studies of essay topics have begun to produce evidence that variations in the wording and content of a topic may affect what and how well a student writes. Our ability to propose and interpret studies of the effects of the phrasing of essay topics is limited by our post-structuralist awareness that an essay topic is a text which, like any other text, possesses very limited control over what any particular reader will make of it. A reader topics her own topic, just as she poems her own poem, and the reader-constructed topic will resemble what the writer of the test topic intended only to the extent that the writer is able to restrict the possibility of readings that differ too much from what was intended. Probably, until we better understand what is involved, our safest bet, when preparing sets of essay topics for large-scale examination programs, is to minimize opportunities for miscommunication by keeping the topics as