Designing Writing Tasks for the Assessment of Writing

This volume reports the results of a series of investigations of the properties of writing tasks their authors'' intentions and the responses that these tasks evoked in student-writers and teacher-raters. The volume explains how both student-writers and teacher-raters in their reading of the same topic/text can arrive at different meanings. The investigations undertaken led the authors to make a number of recommendations about selecting subjects specifying audience and mode formulating instructions and wording the topic. These recommendations are presented in non-technical language in a comprehensive set of Guidelines for Designing Topics for Writing Assessments.