This handbook is intended to help high school and college counselors effectively use and interpret ACT results. It contains four main sections: Section 1, "Components of the ACT," which contains general information about the ACT tests, probably will be of interest both to high school counselors and to college advisors and other staff. …

The purpose of this study was to examine rater, domain, and gender influences on the assessed quality of student writing using weighted and unweighted scores. Twenty rates were randomly selected from a group of 87 operational raters contracted to rate essays as part of the 1993 field test of the Georgia High School Writing Test. All of the raters…

The purpose of this study was to describe the Rasch model for measurement and apply the model to examine the relationship between raters, domains of written compositions, and student writing ability. Twenty raters were randomly selected from a group of 87 operational raters contracted to rate essays as part of the 1993 field test of the Georgia…

The effects of presenting a choice of writing tasks on the quality of essays produced by eleventh graders were studied with 34,200 students in Georgia. The choice condition had no substantive effect on the quality of essays, but race, gender, and the writing task variable did. (SLD)

The necessity of controlling the order in which trained essay raters for a statewide writing assessment program receive student essays was studied. The underlying theoretical question concerns possible rater bias caused by raters reading long strings of essays of homogeneous quality; this problem is usually referred to as context effect or…

Statistical equating of scores from direct writing assessments is performed in Maryland to hold the difficulty of passing the Maryland Writing Test (MWT) equivalent from year to year and to allow a demonstration of growth in student writing achievement over the years. Passage of the test is a high school graduation requirement. Prior to…

This research examined the results from direct and indirect writing assessments to determine the most effective method of discrimination. The New Jersey State Department of Education developed a test for ninth-grade students which was designed to measure the ability to apply writing mechanics to written text and to communicate effectively in…