Frequently
Asked Questions - Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA)
Writing Assessment
Grades 5 - 8 and 11 - February 2008
Information for Parents or Guardians
What is the PSSA designed to do? The PSSA is designed to provide information about the quality of
schools to parents, school districts, and the general public.
Who is participating in the assessment? Students in grades 5 - 8 and 11 in all 501 school districts will take
the writing assessment. Since the assessment is designed
to help determine the quality of the school programs, all students are to
be included. Nonpublic and private schools may participate on a voluntary
basis.
How long are the assessments and when will they
occur? The writing assessment will take approximately three hours.
The assessments will be scheduled by the school districts to take place
during the testing window in February. Your school district should
inform you about the assessment schedule.
What will the assessment include? The assessment consists of twenty multiple-choice revising and editing
questions and two writing prompts. All items were written to align
with Pennsylvania's assessment anchors content standards. The
evaluation of the responses to these test times allows for a broad
measurement of the writing skills taught by Pennsylvania schools.
What will be assessed in writing? The writing assessment provides a direct performance measure of
students' abilities to develop, organize, and express their ideas in a
variety of writing situations. The writing assessment is intended to
evaluate performances of individual students, to provide comparative data
about the school's writing program, and to serve as a validity check of
the school's local assessment of writing.
Who decided what the assessment should measure? Groups of educators from all levels of education in Pennsylvania chose
the areas of knowledge on which the assessment is based. The groups
included teachers, supervisors, curriculum directors, and college
specialists. They also reviewed, edited, and approved the test
items.
Who will administer the assessments? Each school chooses the staff who will administer the
assessment. In most cases, these are the students' teachers, who are
often helped by the principal or guidance counselor.
How will the written responses be scored? Evaluators trained in applying a holistic scoring system will score
the written responses to the writing prompts. The holistic system
includes a mode-specific scoring guideline which addresses the student's
composition for the effective use of focus, content development,
organization and style. The system also includes a conventions
scoring guideline which addresses the student's use of conventions for
control of sentence formation, grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation.
Composition and conventions are scored separately on 4-point scales to
indicate the writer's level of competence.
How will the results be reported?
Two copies of the individual student report for writing will be sent to
the school districts for distribution to parents, teachers, guidance
counselors, and/or principals. The state will not receive any
reports with individual names included.
School-level reports will be used for curricular and planning purposes.
School districts may publish the results of PSSA testing for each school.
The state will also release school-by-school assessment data.
Can parents (guardians) see the writing assessment? Once the assessments arrive at the school, parents (guardians) may
review the assessments by making arrangements with the school assessment
coordinator. Confidentiality agreements must be signed, and no copies of
the assessments or notes about items will be permitted to leave the
school. If, after reviewing the assessments, parents do not want
their child to participate in the writing assessment due to a conflict
with their religious beliefs, they may write to the school district
superintendent prior to the beginning of the assessment to exclude their
child from the assessment.
