An assignment given to students at the end of an advanced composition class empowers students by helping them grasp principles and develop abilities that allow them to get beyond needing teachers. The crux of the assignment is a heuristic for analyzing any particular type of writing for the purpose of learning to produce it. The students are…

A study was conducted to replicate partially John Gould's study using more advanced machines and editors, and to test several of Colette Daiute's hypotheses about writing with the computer. Gould's study indicated that expert writers using text editors required 50% more time to compose on text editors than on hard copy, and the extra time did not…

In preparation for adding an essay test to the General Educational Development (GED) test, the GED Testing Service undertook a series of studies to establish (1) whether acceptable reading reliabilities were attainable in decentralized holistic scoring sessions often involving no more than a dozen papers; (2) whether essay readers in a variety of…

A study was conducted to investigate the effects of handwriting on the grades assigned to essays. Contrary to previous studies, this study employed a grading situation in which teachers holistically evaluated many papers as rapidly as possible simulating real grading conditions. Good handwriting was defined as that done by five experts in the…

The use of error pattern analysis can reduce the time and money spent on editing and correcting manuscripts. What is required is noting, classifying, and keeping a frequency count of errors. First an editor should take a typical page of writing and circle each error. After the editor has done a sufficiently large number of pages to identify an…

The semantic differential scale developed by Charles Osgood, George Suci, and Percy Tannenbaum can be modified to create a method of evaluating student writing that is clear, efficient, flexible, and specific. Based upon the premise that most terms have several dimensions of meaning, the theory creates scales by drawing "lines" through the…

The focus of the conference proceedings in this booklet was evaluation of student writing at various levels and in various fields. The booklet contains a schedule of activities; a description of the morning session, which included a panel discussion on evaluating writing in college freshman composition courses; examples of students' papers, with…

Based on a preliminary version of this study, project aims were to learn what college freshmen knew about presidents in office from the late 19th century to the present and to determine the students' writing levels. During the first class of each of five semesters, students enrolled in an American History Since 1985 course were asked to write one…

This report presents the results of a battery of sentence combining tasks included in the assessment of writing conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1978-79. The first section of the report provides background information about the NAEP survey and discusses the procedures used to develop and score the sentence combining…

The New York State Regents Competency Tests in Writing and Comprehensive Examination in English reflect the belief that the current emphasis on test results mandates that testmakers produce tests that actually test what they purport to test, reflect what educators agree should be taught, and have a beneficial influence on teaching. Prior to the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative validities of four essay scoring systems, reflecting alternative conceptualizations of the writing process, for identifying "competent" writers. Each rater was trained in two of the four scoring systems: General Impression Scoring (GI), Diederich Expository Scale (DES), CSE…

A questionnaire was sent to English instructors in 134 Texas colleges and universities to ascertain their perceptions of entering freshmen's skills in written composition. The variables were type of institution, admission policy, enrollment, and teaching experience. Respondents were asked to indicate their perceptions of the number of entering…

Two methods of evaluating student writing were compared. Holistic evaluation attempts to assess the overall quality of a composition. It is a guided procedure for sorting or ranking written composition. A rater scores the composition by placing it within the range of papers produced in response to a given assignment. Scoring may also be done using…

Program Analysis and Monitoring (PAM) in Writing is a decision-support tool which provides the principal with an informative report, the Program Analysis Report, that identifies needs and suggests solutions to problems in educational writing programs. The Report relates information on student achievement in writing to information on how resources…

These three booklets include the writing assessment tests of the Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program for grades 5, 8, and 11. The first exercise in each booklet is the writing of a story using a photograph as the stimulus. The second exercise is the revision of a story written previously. The eleventh grade test also includes a third exercise:…