Although peer review has been widely used for formative assessment in writing instruction, there remain concerns about whether assessors are at a sufficient writing performance level that would allow them to identify major problems in the reviewed work and provide helpful feedback to improve draft quality. Little empirical research has examined…

The purpose of this multiple intrinsic case study was to describe how Northeastern United States middle school teachers and students engaged with a new automated writing evaluation tool used to score and provide feedback on extended essay assignments to improve teaching and learning writing. Richard Elmore's (1993) instructional core framework is…

It has been theoretically and empirically acknowledged that collaborative feedback is beneficial to learning achievement. However, feedback research remains relatively contentious due to learners' differing viewpoints on how feedback is best given. Although a large number of studies have explored learners' perspectives on collaborative feedback,…

The present study mainly focuses on the topic development in student written production through the consistency between student self-assessment and teacher assessment. In the present study, topic development means "cohesion", "overall organization", and "coherence". It proposes the next hypotheses: (i) Students could…

Writing assessments have taken two primary forms in the past two decades: direct and indirect. Irrespective of type, either form needs to be anchored to making decisions in the classroom and predicting performance on high-stakes tests, particularly in a high-stakes environment with serious consequences. In this study, 11th-grade students were…

In this article I present some findings of an action research study intended to find out to what extent a teacher-student partnership in writing assessment could promote high school students' autonomy. The study was conducted in a U.S. school. Two main action strategies in the assessment process were the use of symbols as the form of feedback…

This essay describes Louisiana State University's search for an alternative to available placement protocols. Under the leadership of Les Perelman at MIT, LSU collaborated with four universities to develop iMOAT, a program for administering online assessments of student writing. This essay focuses on LSU's On-line Challenge, which developed from…

A random sample of language arts, social studies, and science high school teachers (N = 361; 53% women) from the United States were surveyed about what their students wrote, their use of evidence-based writing practices, the adaptations they made for weaker writers, how they assessed writing, their preparation to teach writing, beliefs about the…

In this study, we investigated a variety of Reader effects that may influence the validity of ratings assigned to AP® English Literature and Composition essays. Specifically, we investigated whether Readers exhibit changes in their levels of severity and accuracy, and their use of individual scale categories over time. We refer to changes in these…