Writing Performance of High School Students in Chile: A Direct and Indirect Assessment of Writing

The objectives of the research were to describe the performance of high school students in a direct assessment and an indirect assessment of writing and to determine the degree of relationship between performance in both tests. The methodology was quantitative and included the participation of a sample of high school seniors in Chile (n = 143). The participants took a direct assessment of writing, specifically an argumentative essay evaluated in 8 dimensions; and an indirect assessment, which corresponded to exercises in the use of connectors and sentence order. In the study, we found that the students presented an average performance in the direct and indirect evaluation. In the direct evaluation, the dimensions Spelling, Coherence, Cohesion and Use of arguments were the lowest-performing. Finally, we found that there is no correlation between performance in the direct and indirect assessment of writing.