How we can create a writing age

In our last two posts, we’ve looked at how we are able to create NAPLAN bands for our Australian writing assessments, and then at the drawbacks of any grading system.

In this post, we’ll look at an alternative to grades: writing ages.

Reporting assessment information as a typical age gives you the best of both worlds: you get the detail and nuance of a scaled score, but also the clarity and ease of understanding of grades. (In fact, I’d argue that age scales are more intuitive than grades — everyone understands how ages work, but does everyone really understand the difference between a grade called proficient and one called developing?)

Reading tests have been reporting their scores as typical ages for a long time now. Here at No More Marking, we have created what we think is the world’s first writing age scale. Here is how it works.

• Over the last few years, we have assessed about half a million pieces of primary writing. Our first step is to identify all the pieces of writing completed by students at a certain age. So for example, we look at all the writing completed by students aged 7 years 2 months.
• We then look at the average score of all of their writing by pupils aged 7y2m. In this case it is 470. So 7y2m = 470.
• The next step is simply to flip that round. 47- = 7y2m. We can now say to any student scoring 470 that they have a writing age of 7y2m.
• We repeat this for every scaled score point.

We have completed this analysis for our big projects in England. We have not yet completed a similar analysis for Australia, because we haven’t assessed enough pieces of writing. However, it’s something we hope to do in the future as we grow.

For now, even though we haven’t reported writing ages in the Australian reports, if a school want to they can use the England scaled score-conversion table look up. This is based on data from England, where the school year and school start age are different to Australia, so it won’t be completely accurate. However, it may still help you to make sense of our scaled score.

To find out more about our Australian writing projects, sign up for our webinar on Tuesday 26th October at 7pm AEDT.