Direct and Indirect Assessment of Writing

This book shed some light on how two approaches to writing assessment: direct formats, which require candidates to compose a piece of writing, and indirect formats, which do not necessarily require any text generation. The study also looks at another type of writing assessment in between these two paradigms, called semi-direct, where the text production is more controlled than the direct assessment. The investigation of these assessment approaches is focused on three areas. First, it looks at whether indirect formats, represented here by an editing task, relates to the direct formats, represented here by an essay task, letter and summary writing tasks (as semi-direct formats), in respect of predicting someone's writing ability. Then it looks at whether students' total scores, as well as, their subscores in grammar, spelling, punctuation will vary or not. Similarly, it looks at their content scores in the letter and the summary task.