Gives historical background of the achievement of Ellis Page and his attempt to create a means by which computers could be used for analyzing and evaluating student writings. Provides critical reception of the original studies by Page. Discusses three current computer approaches to the task of evaluating student writing. (HB)

A document prepared by the Commission on Composition in the early 1970s, "The Student's Right to Write," has some usefulness for contemporary practitioners of writing instruction. The report reflects the strong initiative arising in the '70s to rethink the beliefs and practices then prevalent in the field of English teaching. At the…

Reflects on a long career concerning teaching and testing at the secondary and college level. Talks about the relationship between secondary school testing and preparation, college entrance standards, and trends in college course organization and testing. (TB)

Describes the development, beginning in 1988, of Vermont's portfolio-based writing assessment program, pointing out the inevitable tension in assessment programs between the need for measurement and a wish for professional development that leads to improved instruction. (SR)

Since the first definitive references to portfolio evaluation in assessment literature, metaphors have been significant in shaping students' and teachers' understanding of the role of the portfolio in the writing classroom. Consider the range of metaphors employed in discussions about portfolios. Margie Krest, for instance, emphasizes the social…

Explores the history of testing, motivations for testing, testing procedures, and the inevitable limitations of testing. Argues that writing program faculty and administrators must clarify and profess their values, decide what they want students to know and what sort of thinkers they should be, and develop tests reflecting those needs. (SR)

Offers an account of three "waves" of writing assessment: objective tests, holistic scoring, and portfolios. Scrutinizes these modes of assessment for how they can serve needs beyond the institutional demands of sorting and selecting students, to discover what they can tell educators about writing, teaching, and courses and programs. (SR)

It is a commonly held assumption that Harvard-trained rhetoricians during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were concerned mainly with superficial mechanical correction, and, further, that they dissociated student writing from any meaningful context and contributed to the division between composition and literature. Howard James Savage was…

In the early twentieth century behaviorist Edward L. Thorndike began the development and use of measurement scales to replace personal judgment to evaluate student compositions in U.S. public schools. In 1912, utilizing the Fullerton and Catell equal difference theorem, Milo B. Hillegas released the first scientifically designed scale to measure…

A history of the Test of Written English (TWE), a section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), describes its inception and development process. The new test is a thirty-minute essay test providing a measure of a non-native English-speaker's ability to perform academic writing tasks similar to those required of international…