Background: Learning to write the complex academic language (AL) associated with a discipline (like science) is a critical task in education, with middle school being a key developmental period. However, we need more research to guide how we assess students' learning to write AL, especially if we want to create assessment that guides more…

School-age English learners (ELs) are faced with the challenging task of acquiring a foreign language while simultaneously reading academically demanding literature. Therefore, the current research aimed to examine the relation between the rate of grammatical tense marking errors made by ELs and their performance on measures of reading…

To ensure adequate writing support for children, a profound understanding of the subskills of text quality is essential. Writing theories have already helped to better understand the contribution of different subskills to text quality, but empirical work is often limited to more general low-level transcription skills like handwriting fluency and…

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers--narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned…

School-aged English Learners (ELs) are faced with the challenging task of acquiring a foreign language while simultaneously reading academically demanding literature. Therefore, the current research aimed to examine the relation between the rate of grammatical tense marking errors made by ELs and their performance on measures of reading…

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is a method designed to explicitly teach students self-regulation skills and help them implement them. While SRSD's beneficial effect on writing quality has been confirmed in a large body of literature, the questions of why, how, and for whom SRSD works remain unclear. To investigate the underlying…

Educators play an important role in ensuring that students attain the necessary strategic actions to become skilled writers. Studies have indicated that teachers need to consistently embed a larger range of evidence-based writing practices in their instruction to help their students improve the overall quantity and quality of their writing. The…

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality…

One aim of this article is to shift mindsets from the traditional identification of written language abilities that are "missing" in students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) to writing assessment as the discovery of more complex language strengths foundational to success across disciplines. The multiple language-levels (MLL)…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to advance the analysis of written language transcripts by validating an automated scoring procedure using an automated open-access tool for calculating morphological complexity (MC) from written transcripts. Method: The MC of words in 146 written responses of students in fifth grade was assessed using two…

Teachers of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) often struggle with simultaneously meeting students' writing and behavioral needs. Building on existing Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) literature, this study investigated the collateral effects of SRSD with social skills prompts on the writing outcomes and problem…

We investigated the promise of a novel approach to formative writing assessment at scale that involved an automated writing evaluation (AWE) system called MI Write. Specifically, we investigated elementary teachers' perceptions and implementation of MI Write and changes in students' writing performance in three genres from Fall to Spring…

We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3-5 drawn from a larger…

Recent reviews of automated writing evaluation systems indicate lack of uniformity in the purpose, design, and assessment of such systems. Our work lies at the nexus of critical themes arising from these reviews. We describe our work on eRevise, an automated writing evaluation system focused on elementary students' text-based evidence-use. eRevise…

Automated writing evaluation systems can improve students' writing insofar as students attend to the feedback provided and revise their essay drafts in ways aligned with such feedback. Existing research on revision of argumentative writing in such systems, however, has focused on the types of revisions students make (e.g., surface vs. content)…