Overview

Do your learners/employees have the writing skills to cope with study and workplace demands?

The Adult Online Writing Assessment (OWA) is a secure, online assessment and reporting tool for identifying the writing capabilities of:

  • vocational learners
  • ESL students
  • students enrolled in higher education pathway programs and
  • graduates and professionals in the workplace.

Candidates interact directly with the web based interface, typing their responses to a set of pre-allocated writing tasks. 

The assessment builds on learners’ intrinsic motivation to use computers and, because of the automated marking system, frees up trainer time. The computerised assessment of writing aims to provide clients with an accurate and efficient way to assess literacy skills to support students and employees in developing and enhancing their writing skills.

The OWA features writing tasks in the argumentative and report writing genres.  Assessing candidates across multiple tasks provides a holistic picture of writing capabilities and increased assessment reliability.

Administration of the OWA is flexible; clients have the freedom to choose when and where candidates sit the assessment.  Each candidate is provided with a unique username and password to complete the writing tasks.

OWA tasks are aligned to the Australian Core Skills Framework, the common national reference point for describing performance in the core skill areas.  OWA prompts are targeted at adult audiences across ACSF levels.  See ACSF.

OWA offers clients advanced analysis techniques that provide instant candidate reports.  ACER uses the Intellimetric® automated essay scoring system (AES) from Vantage Learning to automatically score the OWA essays.  The Intellimetric® system is ‘trained’ with a set of scripts and their scores. See Scoring system.

OWA reports provide summative, formative and diagnostic feedback to learners and trainers.  See Reporting system.

At the vocational and ESL levels, the OWA can be delivered in conjunction with ACER's core skills assessment tool, the Core Skills Profile for Adults.