EVALUATION AND TEACHERS PERCEPTIONS OF GENDER IN 6TH-GRADE STUDENT-WRITING

The desire for accountability has led designers of large-scale writing assessment to embrace a formal semantics theory of writing evaluation that disregards cultural influences on the writing and marking proces ses in its emphasis on consistency and unbiased scoring of student wri ting. However, an examination of the scores assigned to the narrative writing of elementary and middle-grade students on large-scale examina tions in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States reveals the need to consider sociocultural influences because scores on girls' writing are consistently higher than scores on boys' writing. This study inve stigates the relationship between teachers' perceptions of gender-rela ted differences in grade six students' narrative writing and teachers' scoring of five narrative papers written by sixth-grade boys and girl s. Participating teachers scored the narrative papers using a Canadian provincial scoring guide. The teachers who did not know the gender of the writers were asked to identify the gender of the writer (if possi ble) and to describe the characteristics of the narrative that helped them to determine the writer's gender. All teachers were asked to comp are and contrast girls' and boys' classroom narrative writing. Signifi cant differences in the scores appeared for only one paper, written by a girl, that exemplified both male and female narrative writing chara cteristics. Teachers who felt that a girl wrote this paper scored the paper significantly higher than teachers who identified the writer as a boy. Teachers who disagreed in their identification of the writer's gender drew upon similar elements from the writing to support their vi ews, yet evaluated those elements in contrasting ways that revealed a stance privileging girls' narrative writing. In addition, teachers cha racterized girls' classroom writing as being more sophisticated than b oys' writing on all five dimensions of Moffett's (1968) continuum of d iscursive growth.