This report describes the North Carolina Annual Testing Programs writing task which was administered in 1985-86. Grade six students were tested on their ability to write a clarification composition; while grade 8 students were evaluated on their skills in writing a persuasive composition. The timed composition (50 minutes) was scored by two…

A small scale research project involving teaching writing skills to slower learning students in three different Scottish schools is the focus of this volume. Chapter 1 discusses the context and nature of the project, while chapter 2 presents teachers' accounts of their professional practices in teaching writing, including their perceptions of…

Gifted students' writing may exhibit stylistic dissonance--a mixture of basic writing features may coexist with features indicative of much higher levels of rhetorical control. A case study of an 11-year-old sixth grade student who attended a freshman composition course at an Arkansas university illustrates this dissonance. The poems and short…

An instructional management system, called Response System with Variable Prescriptions (RSVP), is described in this report as it is used at Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC). Following introductory material, the relevance of such a system to current educational issues is explored and the use of computer technology in education is discussed. The…

Nonnative English speaking college students often find themselves in a remedial course along with native speakers of English who are there on the basis of their high school performance. To determine how well the nonnative student can write, the English teacher could give a two-part diagnostic test. The first part of the test would assess the…

This evaluation of writing in the West Hartford CT Public Schools was part of a large evaluation of English/Language Arts. To provide information for program improvement and growth, the evaluation focused on six issues: (1) the extent of implementation of West Hartford's Composition Program; (2) how teachers use the Composition Program in their…

This paper reports on Educational Testing Service research studies investigating the parameters critical to reliability and validity in both the direct and indirect writing ability assessment of higher education applicants. The studies involved: (1) formulating an operational definition of writing competence; (2) designing and pretesting writing…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examination in English 30 in Alberta, Canada, this test contains (1) general instructions, (2) two minor assignments consisting of literature readings about which the student must write a personal response, and (3) a major assignment requiring students to show how the authors they studied in senior…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examination in English 30 in Alberta, Canada, this test contains (1) general instructions, (2) two minor assignments consisting of literature readings about which the student must write a personal response, and (3) a major assignment requiring students to show how the authors they studied in senior…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examination in English 33 in Alberta, Canada, this test on writing contains general instructions and three sections: (1) personal response to literature, which requires a response about an aspect of literature; (2) functional writing, which requires a written response within a given situation or…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examination in English 33 in Alberta, Canada, this test on writing contains general instructions and three sections: (1) a personal response to literature, which requires a response about some aspect of literature; (2) functional writing, which requires a written response within a given situation…

Nine selected papers presented at the Texas Writing Research Group's 1981 conference are offered in this collection. The papers discuss (1) sources of linguistic interference among American minorities; (2) contributions of discourse analysis to composition; (3) emerging notions of heuristic (investigative), eristic (controversial), and protreptic…

The literature on essay testing, and particularly the selection of topics which will stimulate the writing of essays, was reviewed in order to recommend a set of specifications that will produce topics that are maximally fair to all teacher certificate candidates. It was found that by far the greater part of the research relating to writing…

The proceedings of the fourth annual Association of Writing Supervisors within the City University of New York (CUNY) are offered in this special newsletter issue. The papers from the proceedings are organized under the five thematic strands of the conference, which confronted the central issues of writing instruction at CUNY. The five strands are…

Four systems for scoring student essays were used to classify eleventh grade and undergraduate students according to writing ability. The reliabilities of the raters and the validities of the systems in classifying students were emphasized. Two analytic scoring systems--which assume that quality writing is characterized by the inclusion of certain…