The increasing diversity of students in contemporary classrooms and the concomitant increase in large-scale testing programs highlight the importance of developing writing assessment programs that are sensitive to the challenges of assessing diverse populations. To this end, this paper provides a framework for conducting consequential validity research on large-scale writing assessment programs. It illustrates this validity model through a series of instrumental case studies drawing on the research literature conducted on writing assessment programs in Canada. We derived the cases from a systematic review of the literature published between January 2000 and December 2012 that directly examined the consequences of large-scale writing assessment on writing instruction in Canadian schools. We also conducted a systematic review of the publicly available documentation published on Canadian provincial and territorial government websites that discussed the purposes and uses of their large-scale writing assessment programs. We argue that this model of constructing consequential validity research provides researchers, test developers, and test users with a clearer, more systematic approach to examining the effects of assessment on diverse populations of students. We also argue that this model will enable the development of stronger, more integrated validity arguments.

David H. Slomp and M. Elizabeth Sargent have written a commentary on the responses by Joseph P. Kutney (December 2007) and by Libby Miles et al. (February 2008) to Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle .Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions:(Re)Envisioning First-Year Composition as Introduction to Writing Studies which appeared in the June 2007 issue of CCC.