Presented by Sara C. Weigle
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2011
Time: 12:30 – 1:40 pm Los Angeles Time (3:30 – 4:40 pm New York Time)
Location: Online Webinar (Free)
The assessment of student writing is an essential task for language teachers, and yet many graduate programs do not require students to take a course in assessment or evaluation, and courses on teaching writing often devote only a limited amount of time to the discussion of assessment. Furthermore, teachers frequently need to prepare their students for externally mandated large-scale writing assessments, and thus they need to have an understanding of the uses and misuses of such tests. In this webinar we will explore the essential considerations in classroom and large-scale writing assessments. Topics to be discussed include designing tasks for writing assessment, scoring rubrics, computer scoring of writing, and portfolio assessment.
Sara Cushing Weigle is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language at Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA in 1994. She has conducted research in the areas of assessment, second language writing, and teacher education, and is the author of Assessing Writing (2002, Cambridge University Press). Her work has been published in Language Testing, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Assessing Writing, and TESOL Quarterly, and she is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences. She is actively involved in several professional organizations and served as co-chair of the Language Testing Research Colloquium in Denver, Colorado, in 2009.