A commonly held belief among educators, researchers, and students is that high-quality texts are easier to read than low-quality texts, as they contain more engaging narrative and story-like elements. Interestingly, these assumptions have typically failed to be supported by the literature on writing. Previous research suggests that higher quality…

The purpose of this paper is to compare the precision of direct and indirect measures of writing assessment using the test information functions from a graded response Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Subjects were 192 sophomore English students from a parochial high school in Wisconsin. Both direct and indirect measures of writing ability were…

The Test of Standard Written English (TSWE) is a 50-item multiple choice instrument designed to assess the ability of college students to use English. In this study, based upon a sample of 45 students, the TSWE was revalidated with writing samples. The coefficient of 0.54 was most impressive given that the TSWE scores were restricted to those…

This study is an attempt at a cohesive characterization of the concept of essay reliability. As such, it takes as a basic premise that previous and current practices in reporting reliability estimates for essay tests have certain shortcomings. The study provides an analysis of these shortcomings--partly to encourage a fuller understanding of the…