Designed for educators actively involved with the teaching of writing, this summary report contains an overview of the background, major findings, and recommendations of the 1979 Manitoba (Canada) Writing Assessment Program. Various sections of the report provide the following information: (1) highlights of the general report of the program; (2)…

Contributes to the knowledge of portfolio systems for writing evaluation by sharing evaluative procedures and their results. Reports on the results of a survey of students evaluated using a portfolio system. Finds that students preferred the portfolio system. (RS)

Designed for educators actively involved with the teaching of writing, this report contains an overview of the procedures and a detailed presentation of the findings and recommendations of the 1979 Manitoba (Canada) Writing Assessment program. Following an introduction, the five major sections of the report provide the following information: (1)…

Summarizing the best current thinking about what classroom approaches produce sound writing experiences in the first eight grades, this book offers teachers a means of checking on their own practices and perceptions about how writing can best be learned. The first chapter of the book presents a historical review of authoritative opinion regarding…

Every year approximately 1,300 first-year students at the Rochester Institute of Technology complete a 50-minute placement essay during summer and fall orientations. The essays are scored holistically, and the students are placed into one of three levels of an English composition course. At the end of the 10-week quarter of instruction, students…

Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

The writing across the curriculum program at Michigan Technological University was designed to change teacher and student attitudes about course-assigned writing as well as to change writing practices by means of a series of faculty workshops. After four years, a team of seven faculty members from rhetoric and composition, literature, psychology,…

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents. In this article, I examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring. I compare LSA methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems…

A study examined the background, methods, and results of the pilot year of Vermont's Writing Assessment program. Students and teachers from 46 Vermont schools were invited to participate in the 1990-91 pilot year of portfolio assessment. Students in grades 4 and 8 chose samples of their best writing from the school year. Each portfolio was…

A description and supporting materials of the elementary school writing program of the Bay Shore Public Schools (New York) are presented. The description and materials include: (1) the program philosophy; (2) a review of writing research including a 12-point summary of methods for teaching writing and a 10-point summary of the proper classroom…

Intended for composition teachers and researchers, as well as those involved with educational issues apart from the writing community (legislators, administrators, researchers in other fields, parents), this book contains essays that take a critical step beyond the standard arguments of the profession, pushing hard for example, at some of the…

The 18 articles in the first section of this journal issue provide information about the National Writing Project, while the 22 articles in the second section discuss classroom writing projects. Among the topics discussed in the first section are the National Writing Projects in Arizona, Northeast Texas, and Boston; teacher behavior during…

Focusing on the topic of composition, especially in the state of Illinois, this special journal issue begins with a description of the Illinois Articulation Project, a network developed to share and coordinate writing in the state. The second article describes Illinois State University's National Endowment for the Humanities program for…

The development of the City University of New York's writing assessment test is discussed in this paper. Its relationship to the total freshman skills assessment program, which also involves the assessment of minimal competencies in mathematics and reading, is related. The discussion of the test includes descriptions of the test development…

The New Brunswick Writing Assessment Program implemented in grades five, eight, and eleven in New Brunswick (Canada) public schools in 1978 is described in this report, which includes the specific assignments for each grade, a discussion of the general holistic scoring approach used, and characteristics of the responses at each grade, including…