Assessing academic writing in Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education
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Mastering the linguistic skills required in academic writing becomes a challenge at all educational stages. The present study analyses the relationship between the use of linguistic resources and the perceived quality of academic texts with the aim of developing valid instruments for the assessment of text quality. A total of 212 argumentative-expository texts from 65 primary school pupils, 78 secondary school pupils, and 69 university students were analysed. In a first analysis, the morphosyntactic, lexical, and discursive resources of texts were coded. In a second phase, teachers at each educational level evaluated them with an analytical rubric designed to assess linguistic and rhetorical aspects. The results showed a developmental increase in most of the linguistic features analysed, except for the proportion of discourse markers and lexical density. External evaluations showed greater variability in primary and secondary education than at university level, although scores did increase with educational level. The perceived quality of the texts was associated with different features at each level: while productivity was strongly linked to higher scores in primary and secondary education, in higher education a negative correlation emerged between the use of discourse markers and teacher evaluations. These findings will inform the design of evaluation instruments tailored to the specific requirements of each educational stage.
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