Given that nowadays writing skill is included in main standardised tests worldwide as well as nationwide, as writing assessment is employed as a part of performance assessment in classroom testing at high school level in Korea, English teachers are first expected to establish the construct of writing ability explicitly prior to devising other…

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are…

This study investigated the level of generalizability across a few high quality assessment tasks and the validity of measuring student writing ability using a limited number of essay tasks. More specifically, the research team explored how well writing prompts could measure student general writing ability and if student performance from one…

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups.…

In the present study, 49 fifth-graders enrolled the KIPP D.I.A.M.O.N.D. Academy in the 2002-03 school year were individually matched to control student from five feeder schools on the basis of ethnicity, free-reduced lunch status, and fourth-grade achievement on the Reading and Mathematics subtests of the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment…