Phraseology has been flourishing in the field of English writing studies in recent years. However, the focus has primarily been on items with less variability, such as ngrams or lexical bundles. To address this gap, this study investigates concgrams (Cheng et al., 2006), which encompass both constituency and positional variations, in advanced…

A central aim in any assessment program is to ensure fair and stable scoring from administration to administration. When administrations are decentralized, not only in location, but in frequency and in logistical configuration, it is imperative to construct training, certifying, and monitoring systems that provide continuity between the original…

In preparation for adding an essay test to the General Educational Development (GED) test, the GED Testing Service undertook a series of studies to establish (1) whether acceptable reading reliabilities were attainable in decentralized holistic scoring sessions often involving no more than a dozen papers; (2) whether essay readers in a variety of…

Developed as a teaching aid for a General Educational Development (GED) preparation class, this essay writing guide gives students the tools they need to develop and organize ideas for writing an essay with confidence. By following a sequential procedure in this very structured approach, students learn to turn out a well-organized essay. The…

The methods used by the General Educational Development Testing Service (GEDTS) to establish and maintain score stability and reading reliability on its direct assessment of writing are described. Using the 1988 site certification and monitoring results of several scoring sites, the focus is on describing how the score scale was established and…

This manual was developed to help regional administrators and teacher educators conduct inservice training for local teachers who teach writing in preparation for the new General Educational Development (GED) test. The manual is organized in six sections. The first section explains the rationale for the GED writing sample and outlines what the…