To Örebro University

The main purpose of this dissertation, and the four studies it includes, is to investigate some ways in which the concept of writing ability is rendered concrete in different national writing tests. The dissertation combines two theoretical approaches. Assessment theory serves as a framework for the approach to national tests. Tests are understood as a practice aiming at providing evidence for the inferences teachers need to draw about students’ writing ability, in order to make decisions that are part of school practice, such as giving grades. I examine the tests from the perspective of an anthropological theory of text that takes dialogism as its point of departure and views texts as culturally valued utterances. The analyses focus on the relations between writing task, students’ texts and assessment criteria, and how these can be both in alignment and in conflict with the claims on score meaning made by different test constructions.

In the first study, four students’ texts from the national writing test in upper secondary school are closely analyzed to show how a writing task regulates students’ scope for action in their texts as regards global inner structure and perspective on content. The second study investigates how a national writing test was carried out in two classrooms in primary school, and highlights the relations between the task, students’ texts and assessment criteria. In the third study, I argue that a pursuit of reliability in writing tests becomes misguided unless it takes as its starting point the definition of writing ability the tests are made to measure. In the fourth study I examine the writing tasks of the tests in upper secondary school from 2007–2012. The analysis brings four distinct and recurrent task types to the fore, from which a reconstruction of the target domain of writing within the school subject of Swedish is made.

Overall, the dissertation contributes to critical reflection on the understandings of writing expressed by test constructions, and points at possible further development of writing tests, given the theoretical perspective on writing that the dissertation employs.