Historically speaking, students were judged long before they were marked. The tradition of marking, or scoring, pieces of work students offer for assessment is little more than two centuries old, and was introduced mainly to cope with specific problems arising from the growth in the numbers graduating from universities as the industrial revolution…

The methods of evaluating teacher preparation programs are becoming increasingly more reliant on student test data. These test data driven formats, however, are not appropriate for small colleges. Small colleges are currently left off the Tennessee Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs because the colleges did not produce…

This paper presents the response of the technology teacher education programmes at the University of Limerick to the assessment challenge created by the shift in philosophy of the Irish national curriculum from a craft-based focus to design-driven education. This study observes two first year modules of the undergraduate programmes that focused on…

In response to growing concern about the lack of basic writing skills, this paper presents an overview of the issues involved in selecting a method for the assessment of students' writing skills. After general criteria for determining the appropriateness of a writing evaluation procedure are outlined, the merits and limitations of objective tests…

Suggests that direct and indirect measures of writing ability tend to tap similar skills. Concludes that educational decisions about competence in writing can be be made by using a combination of direct and indirect means. (FL)

Two methods of evaluating student writing were compared. Holistic evaluation attempts to assess the overall quality of a composition. It is a guided procedure for sorting or ranking written composition. A rater scores the composition by placing it within the range of papers produced in response to a given assignment. Scoring may also be done using…

Compares the efficacy of objective and holistic writing evaluation, in the context of the freshman writing program evaluation procedure at a west coast university. Indicates that holistic evaluation of writing samples is a far more accurate measure of writing quality and potential. (HTH)

A study investigated the effects of teacher probes, a type of questioning, on children's written revisions. Subjects, 260 children from grades two through six in a midwestern school district of moderate size, were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (probe or comment). Subjects in both conditions were presented with a story starter that…

Scores on a multiple-choice language test involving recognition of language errors were related to those on writing samples, scored atomistically for the same language errors and holistically for communicative effectiveness and correctness. Results suggest the need for clear limits in generalizing from one assessment to others. (Author/GK)

A comparative design for the evaluation of educational programs employing both quantitative and qualitative methods gathers information about program characteristics and consequences. The dual-track design provides separate results that are compared and produce a complete evaluation effort. (Author/CM)

At Golden College (California), student writing samples are holistically scored by pairs of judges on a six-point scale. Judges are allowed to use plus and minus figures, thus converting the integer scale to a decimal scale of evaluation. In 1991, 499 writing samples written as part of the placement testing process for students in the Coast…

A random sample of 175 compositions on the same topic (a lost suitcase) was used in a study examining the correlations between holistic (single impression) and quantitative methods of evaluating student writing. The sample contained 25 papers from each of the following grade levels: four/five, and seven through twelve. A panel of three readers…

This paper provides a brief overview of three direct measures of writing assessment--holistic, analytic, and primary trait scoring--and several variations and combinations of the three. It then relates these measures to eight types of educational decisions: (1) diagnosis of individual learner strengths and weaknesses, (2) student placement, (3)…

Identifies a set of linguistic/rhetorical measures which were developed to analyze cross-cultural differences in student argumentative/persuasive writing at the same age level. Compares the writing achievement of students from America, England, and New Zealand to test these measures, and contrasts these results with those produced by holistic…

A study examined whether Canadian twelfth grade students' papers would rate differently when they were written in different modes and whether there are significant differences between global (modified holistic) scores and rhetorical effectiveness (modified primary trait) scores for the same papers. Fifty students wrote on two transactional topics…