Analyzes approximately 4,800 independent evaluations of 796 essays written by 241 students in 13 first-year writing classes at two colleges. Finds very low consistency of holistically scored student performance from essay to essay, suggesting that drawing conclusions from one or even a few writing samples of a particular student is problematic.…

Once students are asked to assess their own writing progress, they will begin to do their best for writing great prose instead of just great grades. Teachers will have to create a grade-free zone, allow students to set their own writing goals, provide a common language such as the Six Traits Model, and provide evaluation and instructional models…

Powers, Burstein, Chodorow, Fowles, and Kukich (2002) suggested that automated essay scoring (AES) may benefit from the use of "general" scoring models designed to score essays irrespective of the prompt for which an essay was written. They reasoned that such models may enhance score credibility by signifying that an AES system measures the same…

An authentic assessment embedded in a course becomes a teaching tool integral to the aims of the course, not simply a mandated test. The following are appended: (1) Our Initial Rubric for SUNY GE Assessment: Critical Thinking; and (2) Our Revised Rubric for SUNY GE Assessment: Critical Thinking. (Contains 4 notes.)

Adult English as a second language (ESL) students learning English outside of traditional academic settings are an understudied population of second language learners. The purpose of the research reported here is to contribute to meeting the instructional needs of these students more effectively by investigating the relationships between their…

Within large scale educational assessment agencies in the UK, there has been a shift towards assessors marking digitally scanned copies rather than the original paper scripts that were traditionally used. This project uses extended essay examination scripts to consider whether the mode in which an essay is read potentially influences the…

In a more consistent and viable manner than ever before, education in Alabama is moving toward its ultimate goal of providing every student with a quality education, thereby preparing them for work, college, and life after high school. Alabama's graduation rates from 2002 to 2008 increased significantly, tripling the national average increase and…

This paper presents examples of rubrics that can be used in the assessment of the acquisition of generic skills in accounting education. A rubric is a matrix containing the various factors of an assignment along one dimension (rows) and descriptors of the qualitative levels of accomplishment along the other dimension (columns). A rubric can…

This study investigated the level of generalizability across a few high quality assessment tasks and the validity of measuring student writing ability using a limited number of essay tasks. More specifically, the research team explored how well writing prompts could measure student general writing ability and if student performance from one…

Two kinds of scoring templates were empirically derived from summaries written by experts and students to evaluate the quality of summaries written by the students. This paper reports students' attitudes towards the use of the two templates and its differential statistical effects on the judgment of students' summarization performance. It was…

The training of raters for writing assessment through web-based programmes is emerging as an attractive and flexible alternative to the conventional method of face-to-face training sessions. Although some online training programmes have been developed, there is little published research on them. The current study aims to compare the effectiveness…

Possible integrated and independent tasks were pilot tested for the writing section of a new generation of the TOEFL[R] (Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM]). This study examines the impact of various rating designs and of the number of tasks and raters on the reliability of writing scores based on integrated and independent tasks from the…

The majority of high-stakes tests from elementary school through postsecondary education include the timed impromptu essay as a measure of writing performance. For adolescents with writing disorders, this type of evaluation often presents a significant barrier. The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, we investigated the influence of…

This paper investigates the approaches taken to essay writing by five Asian international students at an Australian university. Analysis of their in-depth interviews reveals links between their perceptions of learning, their perceptions of essay writing, their motivation for completing the task, and their awareness of the structural conventions of…

Background: When writing a text, students are required to do several things simultaneously. They have to plan, translate and review, which involve demanding cognitive processes. In order to handle this complexity, writers need to develop a writing strategy. The two most well-defined writing strategies that have been identified, are those of a…