Towards a Domain-Referenced System for Classifying Composition Assignments.

Recently there has been growing awareness that the way in which a writing assignment is worded may greatly influence the nature of the writing process and product. For this reason a domain-referenced system intended to both describe and classify current writing assignments and to create composition assignments was developed for an international study of written composition. The system consists of fifteen dimensions: instruction, stimulus, cognitive demand, purpose, role, audience, content, rhetorical specification, tone/style, advance preparation, length, format, time, draft, and criteria. Writing assignments from a number of countries are cited to illustrate the use of the system. It appears to have some promise as a tool in instruction (increasing awareness of the complexity of writing assignments) as well as in assessments and research (insuring coverage of the domain and comparability of assignments across assessments and research studies). // the teacher is, then, to choose the subject for the student, it is desirable to consider next the principles upon which his choice shall be made. These may be briefly stated as follows: (1) The subject chosen must be one that is interesting to the teacher. (2) The subject chosen must be one that is interesting, or that can be made interesting to the students. (Carpenter, Baker, & Scott, 1903, p. 322) The assessment of writing skills through direct writing samples, rather than through various indirect measures, has become an important issue in the past five years or so. Large-scale assessment programs have been carried out in several countries (including England, Scotland, and the United States) and are beginning in the Netherlands. There are several stages in a writing assessment project, all of which have a number of problems associated with them. Assignment development, development of the scoring system, scorer training, scoring, data analysis, and reporting all involve problems and issues (cf. Meredith & Williams, 1984). We will address the first stage in any assessment, the development of the tasks that are presented to students. Much research in the area of written composition has foundered on the assignment issue, and much evaluation of written composition has been challenged on the basis of the assignments used to assess writing. In general Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 1984