Educators struggle to assess various aspects of reading in valid and reliable ways. Whether it is comprehension, phonological awareness, vocabulary, or phonics, determining appropriate assessments is challenging across grade levels and student abilities. Also challenging is measuring aspects of fluency: rate, accuracy, and prosody. This article…

Three expressive writing tasks from the 1974 national assessment of writing are summarized and discussed in this report. Results indicated that for a majority of students, first-draft expressive writing is unstructured and lacking in coherence. The tendency to integrate feelings and to organize them in coherent expressions develops between the…