Developing national standards for the teaching and assessment of writing

"Developing national standards for the teaching and assessment of writing" is a project under the new National Centre for Writing Education and Writing Research. Its general motivating background is the lack of studies relating to competence developments at grade levels 5-7 in primary school. This lack is all the more crucial in a situation where national educational authorities have decided that a new set of annual writing tests will be developed for nationally representative samples in grades 5 and 8. M ore particularly, the absence of grade-sensitive standards of achievement in writing makes both focused teaching and focused assessment difficult. The aim of the project is to establish a double link empirically, between -working with defined standards i n class and its effect on learning outcomes -working with defined standards in class and its effect on inter-rater reliablity. The project is qualitative in methodological orientation, working with data from a set of geographically distributed case schoo ls. One group of cases will consist of school classes having already worked with establishing standards and one group of cases will consist of school classes without such experience. As an interdisciplinary research contribution, with the cooperation of r esearhers from academic institutions in Trondheim, Oslo and Stavanger, the project will collect data from observation (participant and non-participant), semi-structured interviews, text portfolios and teacher assessment of text portfolios. The main method s of analysis are documented in Berge et al (2005), Kvale (1997) and Thygesen et al (2007). The project is designed as a stage 1 preparation for a full-scale, more quantitatively oriented stage 2. The results from the project will feed into -the design f or a full-scale scale stage 2, but also -the development of a new set of national, sample-based writing tests for primary schools.