Formative writing assessment for change – introduction to the special issue

This current special issue centres on formative writing assessment with children in the elementary grades. Participants in the investigations included in this special issue represent a span from the very youngest students just learning to write to students in fifth and sixth grades who generally have overcome the barriers of knowing how to encode writing, but who face increased demands for producing discursive, audience adapted texts. As editors, we limited papers in the special issue to include studies conducted with students in this grade span because it has been under-researched compared to other grade spans. That these grades have received less attention does not reflect on the importance of early writing instruction; becoming a skilled writer takes time, and the first writing instruction is essential. Becoming a good writer is the result of many complex interactions–including but not limited to–interactions between a writer’s attitude towards writing, her cognitive capacity, the kind of writing instruction she is exposed to, as well as the writer’s perception of textual norms in relation to the reader’s perception of the same norms, and thereby the reader’s textual expectations (Graham, 2018a; Rijlaarsdam et al., 2012; Skar & Aasen, 2021). To help children progress as writers, then, there is a need for tools that can elicit information about students’ writing skills in different domains (e.g. affective, cognitive, textual) and tools that help teachers transform that information into instruction. Such tools are often described as tools for formative assessment. Formative writing assessment has proven to be effective in increasing the writing skills of students. A review by (Graham, 2018b) reported positive effect sizes for text response (d = 0.36), adult feedback (d = 0.87), peer feedback (0.58), self-feedback (d = 0.62) and computerised feedback (d = 0.38). An earlier study by Graham et al. (2011) reported an effect size of d = 1.01 for feedback from adults or peers. So, formative writing assessment can work, and it can lead to positive change. But what is it? Graham (2018b, pp. 145–147) suggested the following definition of formative writing assessment: ‘instructional feedback in writing as information provided by another person, group of people, agency, machine, self, or experience that allows a writer, one learning to write, or a writing teacher/mentor to compare some aspect of performance to an expected, desired, or idealized performance’ and that ‘Formative feedback is derived from assessments that involve collecting information or evidence about student learning, interpreting it in terms of learners’ needs, and using it to alter what happens.’ In other words, formative writing assessment concerns taking actions based on information about a writer’s skills in order to make that writer even more skilled. One might therefore say that formative writing assessment – in the end – is all about consequences. ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATION: PRINCIPLES, POLICY & PRACTICE 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 2, 121–126 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2022.2089488