Content area
Full text
The increasing diversity of students in contemporary classrooms and the concomitant increase in large-scale testing programs highlight the importance of developing writing assessment programs that are sensitive to the challenges of assessing diverse populations. To this end, this paper provides a framework for conducting consequential validity research on large-scale writing assessment programs. It illustrates this validity model through a series of instrumental case studies drawing on the research literature conducted on writing assessment programs in Canada. We derived the cases from a systematic review of the literature published between January 2000 and December 2012 that directly examined the consequences of large-scale writing assessment on writing in- struction in Canadian schools. We also conducted a systematic review of the publicly available documentation published on Canadian provincial and territorial government websites that discussed the purposes and uses of their large-scale writing assessment programs. We argue that this model of constructing consequential validity research provides researchers, test developers, and test users with a clearer, more systematic approach to examining the effects of assessment on diverse populations of students. We also argue that this model will enable the development of stronger, more integrated validity arguments.
A defining characteristic of Canadian identity is diversity, and the multicultural and multiethnic constitution of the Canadian population is as diverse as the country's geographic regions. Aboriginal peoples, for example, are the fastest- growing population in Canada with their youth population growing more than 20% between 2006 and 2011 (Statistics Canada, 2011a). Canadians report using more than 200 different languages as mother tongues, and one in five Canadians speaks a language other than French or English at home (Statistics Canada, 201 lb). Canada also has the highest percentage of foreign-born residents among the Group of Eight (G8), and almost one in five people living in Canada is a visible minority (Statistics Canada, 2011c). Canadians are duly proud of being the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as an official policy (Citizenship and Im- migration Canada, n.d.), often boasting of the merits of the cultural mosaic over the melting pot approach taken by other countries. At a time when, as McLuhan ( 1962) might say, the classroom has become a global village-suffused with cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and geographic differences-demographic diversity is...