Discusses some of the major issues faced in attempting to assess systematically the effectiveness of business-communication courses (by assessing the level of improvement of students' writing competency). Discusses goals of assessment, type of test (standardized versus custom-made), guidelines for scoring, use of results, and reliability and…

Describes how two teachers approach poetry writing with at-risk high school students over a 12-week period, structuring activities to initiate poetry as language play, selecting model poems that are developmentally appropriate, and organizing writing assignments that encourage students to draw on their individual experiences. Discusses conducting…

A review of research on the assessment of second-language writing focuses on these areas: critical variables in writing assessment; types of writing assessment scales (holistic and analytic); the scope of writing assessment (single-campus and large-scale), issues in use of portfolios for assessment (portfolio content, constraints); and the…

Discusses results of a college writing instructor's initial experiment with electronic portfolios-in-progress that caused her to reconsider how she used the system and what she would change. Notes that the instructor found herself taking charge of student texts in ways she had not done in years, and effectively violated most of her beliefs about…

Argues for having first-year composition students "publish" electronic portfolios on the World Wide Web. Provides background on attaining a computer-mediated pedagogy that accounts for its electronic presence and transcends traditional classroom practice. Presents an actual electronic portfolio. Concludes that making an electronic…

Theorizes that three features of electronic texts have changed writing and writing instruction: the creation of a seamless flow of text, word publishing as a rhetorical act, and hypertextual writing and thinking. Discusses implications for how teachers read, respond to, and evaluate student writing. Stresses importance of linking writing…

Discusses use of "mediated texts" as a classroom practice which meets requirements of "accommodation" for alternative demonstrations of competency in academic writing. Defines mediated texts, describes case studies which use these texts with deaf students who are basic writers; and shows connection between this heuristic and…

Explored the usefulness of Galileo, a computerized neural-network content analysis program, in analyzing 11th-grade students' essays on the problems of Chicago public schools and how to solve them. Without subjective coding or characterization of the essays, the program detected salient, meaningful patterns of statistically associated words that…

Examines current reforms in writing assessment, including the California Learning Assessment System writing portfolio. Compares language writing to "the clay that makes the pot." Concludes that writing revolves around criticism, but if assessment stays on the surface, then criticism may not be helpful in pushing the generative aspect of…

School-level assessment of student writing ability using a group-level polytomous item response theory (IRT) model was illustrated in this study. Results with approximately 20,000 students support the viability of an IRT-based school assessment as an alternative to the conventional approach based on aggregation of individual scores. (SLD)

Investigated perceptions of English compositions among four groups of readers in Japan. Analyses of evaluative criteria and readers' comments yielded the following parallel results: inexperienced English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students attended predominantly to content in both judging and commenting on compositions, more experienced EFL…

Assesses the influence of two self-regulated learning strategies (organizing/transforming and task-information seeking) and two other variables (reading ability and self-efficacy for writing) on undergraduate students' compare/contrast essays. Finds that essay quality was correlated with each of the variables, but only reading ability and…

Documents three coordinated, exploratory studies that developed empirically a framework to describe the decisions that experienced writing assessors make when evaluating English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language (ESL/EFL) written compositions. The studies are part of ongoing research to prepare a new scoring scheme and tasks for the writing component…

This article reviews the varied components of written language, suggest informal means for written language assessment, and summarizes the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence varied aspects of writing performance. Two informal evaluation scales are presented that stress the interconnection between oral and written language processes.…

This article explores the relationship between children's prior knowledge of spoken and written discourses and how this influences their attempts at examination writing. Particular emphasis is given to task demand in examination questions and how frequently this fails to acknowledge how prior knowledge might be realized in response to the…