Notes that handwriting achievement can be assessed in degrees from being legible to being illegible. Suggests that a rubric, carefully developed and designed, may well be used to ascertain the quality of handwriting achievement. Gives a brief history of handwriting instruction. Presents 10 points for teachers to follow when teaching handwriting.…

Examines the effects of gender on news article evaluation. Finds that college students judge stories similarly regardless of whether the byline is male or female. Finds that bylines of unclear gender tend to be evaluated somewhat lower. Finds that unsophisticated news readers tend to evaluate women higher on trustworthiness, writing style, and…

Describes the response of a writing group to the author's conventional and scholarly writing. Discusses how the tenured author purposively changed her writing style from traditional academic discourse to experimental critical writing. Concludes that, when writers want to be read, they have to take more chances than standard scholarly style allows.…

Describes a large-scale model of portfolio assessment that used papers collected from 27 fifth grade students throughout a school district in Durham, New Hampshire. Highlights information that can be gleaned from this approach to assessment, and notes that instruction should be adapted to respond to the results of the assessment. (MM)

Examines the correlation between explicit positive or neutral comments by tutors and improvement in high school students' competency test scores. (RAE)

Explains portfolio assessment and how it can be used by educators. Provides responses from three educators who offer their perspectives and suggestions for using portfolio assessment to evaluate reading and writing. (MG)

Examines whether certain student essays produce widely diverging holistic assessments from trained readers, using an essay from the 1986 Early English Composition and Assessment Program (from Miami University's Ohio Writing Project) and evaluating rater response with a questionnaire. Finds that the same paper evoked very different scores and rater…

With adequate guidance and support, parents can be surprisingly effective helpers in a schoolwide writing assessment. Allentown (Pennsylvania) School District relied on parent volunteers to evaluate the overall effectiveness of ninth graders' essays describing a meaningful experience. Because parents' expectations were unbiased, they found…

Evaluates four writing samples from each student in several freshman composition courses. Finds that students did not perform consistently from one assignment to the next. Suggests that knowing how well a student performs on one writing task says very little about how well the student is likely to perform on other writing tasks. (RS)

Describes readers' responses to the task of assigning scores to nonuniform portfolios of student writing. Suggests that reaching the goal of reliability in reading practices will not be easy. Concludes that writing program administrators should greet suggestions for the use of nonuniform portfolios with questioning restraint. (RS)

Considers the problems with ranking students' written work and some of the benefits of evaluating. Argues that teachers should do less ranking and more evaluation. Discusses the limits of evaluation. Asks teachers to foster a "liking" for their students' writing. (HB)

Provides evidence (based on studies of college-entrant essays) that readers form definite impressions of the writer's personality from the text, that these impressions have an important effect on the acceptance of the writer's message, and that information about the reader's perception of the writer's personality can play a critical role in…

Discusses three measures of process assessment, describing checklists, conferences, and self-assessment that focus on the writing process and what writers do as they write. (SR)

Identifies major philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical issues in the controversy over the legitimacy and methodology of using statistical measures to assess the readability of documents. Explores the implications of the controversy for using numerical readability measures to assess written documents. Examines the pedagogical implications…

Discusses the heavy demand on teachers and students for making sense of writing test scores. Illustrates the interpretive demands of going beyond writing test scores to make sense of the scores. Suggests that these demands point to the need for professional development in this area. (RS)