How does the CAASPP assess a student's writing skills?

The CAASPP assesses a student's writing skills primarily through constructed response items and essays. This approach allows students to demonstrate their ability to organize, articulate, and support their thoughts in written form. Constructed response items require students to craft their responses based on prompts that often involve analyzing texts or expressing personal viewpoints, encouraging a deeper level of critical thinking and writing proficiency. Essays offer a more extensive format for students to showcase their writing abilities, including their skills in planning, drafting, revising, and editing.

These methods align with the goal of the assessment to evaluate not just surface-level knowledge but the application of writing skills in various contexts, which is necessary for success in both academic and real-world settings. By engaging with longer, more complex writing tasks, students can illustrate their mastery of writing conventions, argumentation, and coherence in a way that multiple-choice questions cannot capture.