Analitic assessment of 4th grade Chilean students writing

Abstract

The study analyzed a national sample of 2.061 writing samples of 687 fourth grade Chilean students who participated in a national writing evaluation in 2008. Three genres―story, request letter and news story―were evaluated by disaggregated rubrics created for this purpose with five criteria: adaptation to the communicative situation, coherence, cohesion, text structure and punctuation, in addition to a global assessment. The results indicate that there are significant differences in performance according to the dimension and genre evaluated. The highest levels were found in coherence and text structure and the lowest levels in cohesion. Coherence was higher in the story, while text structure was higher in the request letter. The external punctuation is more frequent than the internal and the use of “and” replaces punctuation, especially in the story. These results suggest that an evaluation and education focused on specific aspects of writing could contribute to better overall performance.