This study was designed to address two frequent criticisms of the SAT essay--that essay length is the best predictor of scores, and that there is an advantage in using more "sophisticated" examples as opposed to personal experience. The study was based on 2,820 essays from the first three administrations of the new SAT. Each essay was…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of formulaic writing such as the five-paragraph theme (FPT) or essay for the purpose of earning high scores on high-stakes writing assessments. This qualitative descriptive study analyzed more than 1000 essays from Delaware Grade 8 and 10 writers, written for a statewide…

These three booklets include the writing assessment tests of the Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program for grades 5, 8, and 11. The first exercise in each booklet is the writing of a story using a photograph as the stimulus. The second exercise is the revision of a story written previously. The eleventh grade test also includes a third exercise:…

The writing assessment program in the Cherry Creek, Colorado, schools is described. Writing assessments for students in grades three, six, eight, and 10 have been developed. A holistic approach is used by teachers in scoring these instruments. Improvement of students' essay-writing ability indicates the value of the assessment program. (DWH)

National Assessment of Educational Progress writing sample essays from 1988 and 1990 (495 and 599 essays) were subjected to computerized grading and human ratings. Cross-validation suggests that computer scoring is superior to a two-judge panel, a finding encouraging for large programs of essay evaluation. (SLD)

Examines reasons for using essay tests in the direct assessment of writing ability. Reviews the steps in developing a large-scale testing program; e.g., creating a pool of topics or prompts; developing scoring procedures; training raters; field-testing the system; scoring writing samples; assessing reliability; and assessing validity. (DMM)

Recommendations are made for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment of informative, persuasive, and imaginative writing. Five major objectives should be assessed by NAEP: (1) writing as a way of thinking and learning; (2) writing to accomplish a variety of purposes; (3) managing the writing process; (4) controlling forms…

The Registered Holistic Scoring Method, which has been used for one year to score the ninth grade writing test of the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, is described. Registered Holistic Scoring was developed from the previous holistic approach in order to provide more reliable scoring guidelines year after year. Two trained evaluators…

Since 1979, New York State has been working on an instrument to evaluate elementary school students' writing ability. Several thousand writing samples were obtained and were analyzed, by a test development committee consisting of elementary school teachers, qualitatively within each grade as high, average, and low, and in terms of organization and…

The effects of presenting a choice of writing tasks on the quality of essays produced by eleventh graders were studied with 34,200 students in Georgia. The choice condition had no substantive effect on the quality of essays, but race, gender, and the writing task variable did. (SLD)

The necessity of controlling the order in which trained essay raters for a statewide writing assessment program receive student essays was studied. The underlying theoretical question concerns possible rater bias caused by raters reading long strings of essays of homogeneous quality; this problem is usually referred to as context effect or…

This document presents information to trainers already trained in the Registered Holistic scoring method. It has been developed to assist these trainers in training others in the procedures and the criteria of the new scoring method. The Registered Holistic scoring method was designed and field tested for the ninth grade writing sample component…

A statewide sample testing of writing skills in the fourth, seventh, and tenth grades was conducted by the Michigan Educational Assessment Program in the fall of 1982. This report, which shares the writing assessment information (historical, descriptive, and interpretive) for educational decision-making, was prepared in the hope of increasing…

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…

The differential performance of black and white college freshmen on a direct measure of writing skills, the essay portion of the American College Testing Program's Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP), was studied. The data consisted of responses of a sample of 998 black and 3,727 white examinees to two individual prompts for…