Writing Assessment

Casanave’s chapter on assessment leaves me with a question to which I still have no answer. If critics of traditional psychometric versions of assessment such as Elbow, Hout, and Williamson, who have extensively studied assessment in L1 contexts, are right about the need to localize assessment, that each educational context or setting has the kind of assessment that is unique to it, then would localized assessment ever be possible in L2 writing? When assessment in L2 writing is dictated by criteria set by test centers from foreign countries, what chance do L2 settings have to be able to improvise?

Localized assessment can greatly restore fairness to many EFL educational settings. In countries where everything is centralized or standardized, localization is perhaps the last thing that comes to mind. Students from various linguistic, economic, and social backgrounds are eventually faced with standardized national tests regardless of their learning contexts. On the one hand, there will always be advantaged students who happen to be coming from good and rich schools, and on the other, there are those who are mainly from remote schools. However, despite huge gaps, students from poor schools are often treated the same by central government policy makers who live thousands of miles away. These poor students, like their counterparts from rich schools, are often expected to produce the same outcome and are assessed using the same standardized tests despite unequal learning opportunities and different circumstances.

Since psychometric principles are often blind to such differences in contexts and settings, localized assessment seems to be a good strategy in dealing with circumstantial differences. How much we are willing to turn away from standardized assessments is a question worth thinking and exploring.