EdWeek: NAEP Writing Exams Going Digital in 2011

No quotes from anyone at NCES or NAGB...

NAEP Writing Exams Going Digital in 2011
By Lynn Olson

Starting in 2011, the National Assessment of Educational Progress will test how well students in grades 8 and 12 can write on computers, rather than with the old schoolhouse standbys of pencils and paper.

The board that oversees NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” unanimously approved the change from handwritten to computerized exams as part of a new framework for the writing assessment adopted at a March 1-3 meeting in Nashville, Tenn.

In 4th grade, writing will still be tested using a paper-and-pencil format in 2011, in part because many elementary students currently lack keyboarding skills and experience. But the framework encourages a computer-based writing assessment for that grade as well by 2019.

The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the federally sponsored assessment, approved the changes to reflect the ways in which technology has changed the way people write and the kinds of writing they do. ("On Writing Tests, Computers Slowly Making Mark," Feb. 14, 2007.)

According to the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework, 100 million blogs—online journals—now exist worldwide, and 171 billion e-mail messages are sent daily. Future writing instruction, it says, must take into account how computers affect both the writing process and the types of text produced.

“One of the things that we’ve seen in sites across the country is a huge increase in the uses of computers for writing, both in school and out of school,” said Richard Sterling, the executive director of the National Writing Project, a nationwide professional-development program for teachers housed at the University of California, Berkeley, which applauded the new framework.

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, the director of national programs and site development for the project, said that while moving to a computerized exam will pose a “tremendous challenge for NAEP,” it’s hard to imagine the assessment remaining relevant “if it didn’t allow students to do composing with digital tools.”

More here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/03/14/27nagb.h26.html?print=1