Abstract When Assessing Writing (ASW) was founded 25 years ago, conversations about fairness were very much in the air and illustrated sharp divides between teachers and educational measurement researchers. For teachers, fairness was typically associated with consistency and access. For educational measurement researchers, fairness was a technical issue: an assessment that did not identify the presence of β (the bias factor) was fair. Since its founding, ASW has continued to be a space where evolving discussions about fairness play out. In this article, we examine a selection of 73 ASW research studies published from 1994 to 2018 that use fairness as a category of evidence. In tracing the use of fairness and related terms across these research articles, our goal is to understand how the conversation about fairness has changed in the last quarter century. Following a literature review that situates fairness within generational, standards-based, and evidential scholarship, we analyze five trends in the journal: fairness as the elimination of bias; fairness as the pursuit of validity; fairness as acknowledgement of social context; fairness as legal responsibility; and fairness as ethical obligation. A tidy narrative that theoretical conceptualization of fairness has deepened over the ASW lifespan is not born out by our findings. Instead, evidence suggests that the disparate stances and methodological challenges that informed early research on fairness remain. As well, the textual record suggests that we have not developed or shared taxonomies for systematically investigating questions of fairness. In our desire to make the research we present actionable, we close by calling attention to the need for theorization of fairness, the advantages nuanced of research methods, and the benefits of non-Western perspectives.

中文翻译：

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公平的证据：二十五年的写作评估研究

摘要 25 年前，Assessing Writing (ASW) 成立时，关于公平的讨论非常普遍，说明了教师和教育测量研究人员之间的巨大分歧。对于教师而言，公平通常与一致性和访问权限相关。对于教育测量研究人员来说，公平是一个技术问题：没有确定 β（偏差因子）存在的评估是公平的。自成立以来，ASW 一直是一个不断发展的关于公平的讨论的空间。在本文中，我们精选了 1994 年至 2018 年发表的 73 项 ASW 研究，这些研究将公平性用作证据类别。在追踪这些研究文章中公平和相关术语的使用时，我们的目标是了解关于公平的对话在过去 25 年中发生了怎样的变化。根据将公平置于代际、基于标准和证据奖学金中的文献综述，我们分析了期刊中的五个趋势：公平是消除偏见；公平作为对有效性的追求；公平作为对社会背景的承认；公平作为法律责任；和公平作为道德义务。我们的研究结果并未证实公平的理论概念化在 ASW 生命周期中不断深化的清晰叙述。相反，有证据表明，为早期公平研究提供信息的不同立场和方法论挑战仍然存在。同样，文本记录表明我们还没有开发或共享分类法来系统地调查公平问题。