Life, uncertainty, and writing

If you haven’t listened to Daisy discussing life, uncertainty and VAR, go have a listen and come back. It’s not about football, it’s about life, uncertainty and writing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jx45

If they would have looked at that properly, surely they wouldn’t have given that decision

Any teacher who has had their writing ‘moderated’ will have expressed that same thought. In the past few blogs we have explored a more nuanced way of measuring children's writing ability in our search for certainty in writing. To some, using a statistical model to measure children’s writing is off-putting. We are challenging years of traditional expert judgement. The problem with expert judgement in every field of human endeavour is that we know it is unreliable and biased.

Statistics is a tool to provide a quantified uncertainty

Our true scores express the probability that any piece of writing will be considered better than any other piece of writing by a judge. The probability is never 100%! Writing is complex, but the probabilities do allow us to quantify differences in likely writing ability. As true scores are hard to communicate, however, we translate them into scaled scores and writing ages to help make them more transparent.

We know our approach is more reliable than any other approach to measuring writing ability. And yet, we aren’t just seeking better decisions.

We thought we wanted to use technology to make the right decisions… Whilst we do want more right decisions, we want other things too.

Our writing program doesn’t just aim to give you the right decision on writing. It seeks far more than that. By freeing children’s writing from restrictive rubrics we are seeking to give children’s writing meaning again.

We are attracted to the certainty that writing rubrics seem to offer, but they are an illusion. So, if anyone tries to tell you that your child’s writing is of the Expected Standard, remember Voltaire,

Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is absurd.

This blog is part of a five part series on understanding the scores we produce from our Assessing Primary Writing project. The blogs are:

What does reaching the Expected Standard in writing really mean in Primary Schools in England?

Moving beyond grades: using a powerful statistical model to score writing

Measuring progress with writing scores

From scaled scores to writing ages

Life, uncertainty, and writing

If you would like to find out more about Assessing Primary Writing please visit our website here.