Here, we present a module to introduce student peer review of laboratory reports to engineering students. Our findings show that students were positive and felt that they had learnt quite a lot from this experience. The most important part of the module was the classification scheme. The scheme was constructed to mimic the way an expert would…

Recent studies have shown that languaging contributes to second language skill development. Feedback is often used in combination with languaging as a prompt of verbalization during writing revision, and this combination has shown the effect of increasing the quality of writing. The present study tested whether and how indirect feedback helps…

The small amount of work on workplace writing assessment has focused almost entirely on student readiness for professional writing or included case studies of employer expectations for new writers. While these studies provide insight into current pedagogies for technical writing and writing instruction in general, the main conclusion to be drawn…

Writing is a crucial means of communicating with others and thus vital to success and survival in modern society. This article provides an overview of recent research and key findings about writing, including the roles of cognitive and social processes during writing, and educational research on how to improve writing proficiency. Writing…

Email has become the most preferred form of business communication. Writing "good" email has become an essential skill required in the industry. "Good" email writing not only facilitates clear communication, but also makes a positive impression on the recipient, whether it be one's colleague or a customer. The aim of this paper…

Deaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a…

Literacy is a critically important and contemporary issue for educators, scientists, and politicians. Efforts to overcome the challenges associated with illiteracy, and the subsequent development of literate societies, are closely related to those of poverty reduction and sustainable human development. In this paper, the authors examine literacy…

This study reports on a pedagogical intervention in Spanish second language writing classes designed to shift learners' attention away from lower-order concerns (e.g., morphosyntax) and toward higher-order concerns (e.g., content, tone, organization of ideas) through the support of a Spanish writing fellow (tutor) who worked with the 300-level…

The number of performance assessments continues to increase around the world, and it is important to explore new methods for evaluating the quality of ratings obtained from raters. This study describes an unfolding model for examining rater accuracy. Accuracy is defined as the difference between observed and expert ratings. Dichotomous accuracy…

Drawing on results from a survey distributed nationally through the WPA and WCenter listservs, we examine the affective aspect of failure in teachers' responses to student writing, aiming to pinpoint teachers' perceptions of why students fail. Overall, we posit that writing studies needs to pay closer attention to teachers' emotional responses to…

This article presents information about the planning, implementation, and findings of an assessment-based student portfolio designed by the faculty of a sociology program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, a midsized public regional liberal arts institution. First, we briefly present the rationale for implementing a portfolio system and the…

The purpose of this best evidence synthesis was to identify promising interventions that align with a theoretical model of early writing development, targeting three components of early writing: transcription, text generation, and self-regulation. We determined the extent to which these interventions are effective for children who struggle with…

Improved writing can help students in their academic and professional careers, thus this action research project examined the use of three revision strategies in a graduate course by collecting three sources of data. One-sample t-tests revealed no significant differences across paper scores. However, students indicated rough drafts and rewrites…

Literature revealed that the patterns/methods of scoring essay tests had been criticized for not being reliable and this unreliability is more likely to be more in internal examinations than in the external examinations. The purpose of this study is to find out the effects of analytical and holistic scoring patterns on scorer reliability in…

This essay brings to light new evidence about the relationship between revision and reflective writing in the first-year writing classroom. Based on a robust study of student work, we illuminate a variety of complex relationships between the writing knowledge that students articulate in their reflections--including how they narrate their course…