Intended for teachers and students, this document updates information about the design, sections, and scoring of the Grade 12 diploma examinations in English 30 and 33 for the 1986-87 school year in Alberta, Canada. It contains blueprints illustrating the relationship between the content and scoring of writing and reading test assignments and…

In response to low college-going rates and low persistence rates of college students, Clark Technical College (CTC) initiated the High School Liaison Project to improve articulation between the college and local schools. The project served as an umbrella for several related activities, including a program for assessing the potential college skills…

A study was undertaken to describe assessment activities of four school districts in Maryland (Washington, Cecil, Montgomery, and Charles Counties) designed to parallel a state-mandated competency-testing program required for high school graduation and to report uses of scores and positive and negative impacts from assessment activities. The…

Focusing on the teacher in the problems basic writers experience, a study analyzed the written interaction between a teacher and basic writers, culled from a larger ethnographic study of one freshman composition class. The purpose was to characterize the mode of discourse within a communicative exchange called "theme-ing," which begins…

Intended for college faculty in all disciplines, this guidebook offers practical methods and ideas intended to help teachers clarify writing assignments so that students' writing will improve, as has been seen to happen when teachers sharpen their responses to students' papers. Contents include: (1) "Assigning Writing," which describes…

As part of an examination required by the Alberta (Canada) Department of Education in order for 12th grade students to receive a diploma in French, this booklet contains the composition component of the January 1988 tests. Divided into three essay questions for a total writing time of 2.5 hours duration, parts one and two of the test require…

Intended to assist classroom teachers with promoting and improving children's writing, this book allows teachers to see other professionals and children solve problems that arise in the midst of both teaching and writing. In one sense it is a collection of workshops with the first part of the book emphasizing teacher activity and the second part…

The goal of the 1981-82 examination of the Evaluation Scale (ES) of the City University of New York's (CUNY) Writing Skills Assessment Test (WSAT) was to ascertain if the descriptive criteria of the original ES, instituted in 1978, might be refined in the light of CUNY's four years of experience with large-scale testing at a multicampus…

Prepared by college teachers of writing who are also teachers who write, the papers in this collection appear in a sequence that begins with theoretical issues and problems, moves through the stages of the writing process, and ends with a discussion of revision and evaluation. Specific topics covered in the papers include (1) language theory and…

The viability of the Partial Credit Model (PCM) of G. N. Masters (1982) for scaling and banking individual essay prompts from a statewide writing assessment program was investigated. Preliminary analyses indicated the feasibility of using the PCM, the general polychotomous form of the Rasch model, with essay data from the Maryland Writing Test…

A study was conducted to refine the writing scale incorporated into the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised. The test uses a single scale for judging writing samples from students in grades 2 through 12. It was questioned whether a single, relatively brief rating scale could have the sensitivity required to discriminate among the range of…

As part of an examination required by the Alberta (Canada) Department of Education in order for 12th grade students to receive a diploma in French, this booklet contains the composition component of the June 1988 tests. Divided into three essay questions for a total writing time of 2.5 hours duration, parts 1 and 2 of the test require essays that…

A study was conducted to test the effectiveness of four instructional strategies on students' writing. Students, 138 fourth, sixth, and eighth graders in a semi-rural school district in southern California, were instructed in informational writing through one of four instructional strategies: (1) presentation of model pieces of writing; (2)…

Statistical equating of scores from direct writing assessments is performed in Maryland to hold the difficulty of passing the Maryland Writing Test (MWT) equivalent from year to year and to allow a demonstration of growth in student writing achievement over the years. Passage of the test is a high school graduation requirement. Prior to…

Designed to assist primary teachers in creating a classroom environment that stimulates students' growth in writing, this guide offers suggestions, lists, charts, and activities for classroom use in the primary grades. Following a preface and philosophy, the first section discusses young writers and the writing process, with subsections on stages…