In the spring semester of 1997 an ethnographic study of the teaching of personal narrative at Boston College was conducted. A doctoral student worked with an undergraduate who wrote a personal narrative about her alcoholic father. Two issues arise when teaching autobiographical writing: potential problems with psycho-cognitive distance between…

Intended for both beginning and experienced teachers at the secondary and college levels as well as teacher educators and assessment teams, this book reviews strengths and weaknesses of the major types of writing assessment, both for large-scale evaluations and for the individual classroom. The book includes: practical examples, applications, and…

A study examined the problems that four graduate students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds encountered during their initiation to the written discourse community of American academia during their first year of graduate study in the United States, and how these problems were dealt with. Qualitative data including participant and…

Essays for the Graduate Management Admissions Test must be written with a word processor (except in some foreign countries). The test sponsors, the Graduate Management Admissions Council, believed that this is fair because some word processing skill is a prerequisite for advanced management education. Furthermore, it might also be unfair to…

This document begins with a presentation of research results concerning teachers' comments on student papers. It asserts that positive comments are usually more helpful than negative ones, teachers should play different roles when responding to papers (such as average reader, coach, or editor), comments should be written in the first person and…

Combining three strategies, a composition instructor has attempted to bridge the gap between peer response and teacher expectation in the first-year writing course taught at Florida State University. The focus is on writing that is exploratory and based on personal experience. The instructor: (1) establishes a criteria for producing and evaluating…

A study examined the effect of a computer network which was designed to create a functional learning environment to engage students in writing as a communicative act with a real audience. Subjects, 44 seventh-grade Israeli students, wrote an essay as part of their regular midterm examination and, a week later, wrote another essay for their peers,…

In an attempt to make grading a less arduous, and more accurate, objective task, a checklist of criteria was utilized to grade psychology term papers at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. The method appeared to generate more feedback and lead to greater consistency, as well as a better understanding among students of the grade received. In order…

The purpose of this booklet is to discuss how the curriculum is changing and what assessment methods are needed to monitor and measure the performance of students in the restructured science curriculum. Sections in this booklet include: (1) The need for alternate assessment, (2) Performance assessment, (3) Observation and questioning, (4)…

Intended to give teachers some ideas about how they can implement portfolios in their classrooms, this book contains reproductions of actual materials used by teachers in classrooms as well as examples of students' portfolios across subjects and grades. It also provides research-based information to help teachers explain portfolio concepts to…

This booklet outlines the California state guidelines for writing which assert that students should be carefully taught to read and compose many types of discourse to prepare them for higher education, the job market, and citizenship in democracy. The booklet summarizes the purposes for which the California Assessment Program (CAP) was developed,…

This paper describes the senior honors thesis (a multigenre research paper), and narrates the process by which a senior English major at the University of New Hampshire and her project advisor worked together on this semester-long project. In the first section, the multigenre research paper is defined as a work that combines poems, monologues,…

Twenty countries are participating in the IEA International Study of Written Composition, for which this is a background report. school-based writing in particular, this report discusses the functions of writing from the point of view of culture, cognition, and child development. It also presents a usable model for constructing and evaluating…

Drawing from a review of the literature and a comparative study of evaluation techniques, this paper offers a rationale for the use of performance appraisal as a method of evaluating student writing. The literature review covers: (1) various roles played by composition teachers, including the students' audience of one, writing coach, and Socratic…

In Sweden the International Association Evaluation of Educational Achievement in written composition study involved 4,500 students from grades 6 and 9, as well as students from the terminal grades of the upper secondary school. Students wrote essays of various kinds and replied to questionnaires. Essays were evaluated according to content,…