ASSESSING ESSAYS TO DEVELOP WRITING

Special needs teacher education in Sweden has by tradition been pragmatic and action-oriented. The higher degree of academization the education is now undergoing has revealed deficiencies in the concluding essay project. A low problematization degree, poor grounding in theory as well as undeveloped analyses are among the explanations of the low quality. This article describes a development project conducted at Linnaeus University with a view to improving the quality of student essay writing. With the overarching aim of making students aware of the quality criteria involved in essay writing, students and teachers assessed essays on the basis of 24 different criteria. Initially worked out by teachers, the criteria were developed and supplemented in dialogue with students. After the appraisal the conformity of assessment between student-student, teacher-student and teacher-teacher was presented. The result demonstrates that disagreement exists in the assessment. Teachers and examiners assess the quality of the essays as being somewhat lower in certain respects than what students do, whereas they may give higher values on the basis of other criteria. However, individual differences in assessment among teachers are not fewer than among students. There are clear differences in the evaluation of method, theory grounding, innovativeness and creativity. Subsequent discussions have led to clearer quality requirements for essays and have also to some extent reduced the former interpretation gap.