The chapter describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of repeated peer review assignments in a health sciences program. Details of the assignment, quantitative and qualitative indirect assessments, and considerations for implementing this type of assignment in other courses are provided.

Background: The goals of laboratory experiences include developing knowledge base, research skills, and scientific communication abilities. Objective: The aim was to assess an inquiry-based laboratory activity using the model organism "Caenorhabditis elegans" in relation to learning goals. Method: Students in a "Biopsychology"…

First year undergraduate design students have found difficulties in realising the standards expected for academic writing at university level. An assessment initiative was used to engage students with criteria and standards for a core interdisciplinary design subject notable for its demanding assessment of academic writing. The same graduate…

Assurance of learning continues to be a hot topic in higher education. Both accreditation agencies and employers are asking a key question: Are we graduating students who actually have the knowledge and skills that we promise? This case study focuses on business writing in an MBA program and presents a prescriptive, five-step program to improve…

WebQuests, or inquiry-oriented activities in which learners interact with Web-based information (Dodge, 1995, 1996, 2007), have recently been gaining popularity in education in general and in language education in particular. While it has the advantage of fostering higher-level thinking through authentic assignments, a WebQuest can be challenging…

Measuring the Academic Skills of University Students is a procedure developed in the 1990s at the University of Sydney's Language Centre to identify students in need of academic writing development by assessing examples of their written work against five criteria. This paper reviews the literature relating to the development of the procedure with…

Teachers' feedback on students' written work is an important aspect of pedagogy. However, theoretical views differ on what constitutes "good" feedback, both among applied linguists and academics in other disciplines. In-depth research needs to be carried out into the contextual difficulties of evaluating and assessing academic…

The paper reports and discusses a government-initiated nationwide assessment of writing proficiency among Norwegian compulsory school students. A sample-study of 7th and 10th grade students are discussed and reported with regard to challenges in measuring writing skills in a valid and reliable manner. For the 7th graders the results showed a…

This mixed methods study combining a single-subject experimental design with an embedded case study focuses on the impact of a visual treatment on the handwritten and typed output of a struggling male writer during his 5th through 7th grades who has undergone a longitudinal remedial phase of two and a half years creating text-only material as well…

A seminar was held in England in 1981 to come up with a systematic, detailed analysis of argument and with suggestions on how it should be taught on the secondary level. Within a framework of questions designed to distinguish types and purposes of argument, members of the seminar analyzed four essays paragraph by paragraph. Their comments…

England's Leslie Stratta shares his views on teaching basic writing and assessing student growth in writing. (AEA)

Reflecting the general concern about student writing performance, this book is designed to present recent advances in the theory and practice of assessing writing ability to all teachers of writing, as well as writing examiners and administrators. The book explores (1) reconsidering the links between teaching and assessing writing, (2) the…

In the spirit of the Texas Hill Country Writing Project and in response to the requirements of the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills, this guide presents writing assignments reflecting a commitment to a unified writing program for kindergarten through grade twelve. The framework for the assignments is adopted from the discourse theory of James…

College instructors concerned about student writing quality are provided with information on writing in the content areas and writing across the curriculum. Following an overview of writing in the content area, the chapters focus on writing and learning--"workaday" writing (personalizing knowledge through writing, forms of workaday…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 38 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) how writing centers succeed and fail; (2) the effects of scoring method, topic, and mode on grade 12 students' writing scores; (3) analysis of the peer…