Offers information and suggestions for constructing and using essay questions for assessing inquiry learning. (Author/RK)

Describes a course which allowed students to exercise both creative and critical abilities in a multidisciplinary approach to an important history-of-ideas subject (nature) in American literature. (JM)

Describes how an anonymous sexuality essay was used in an undergraduate sociology classroom to bridge some of the conflicts between the traditional structure of the classroom and the somewhat unusual demands involved in teaching about sexuality. States that the approach rewards both students and professors, as the essays create a "world"…

Claims that Malthus'"Essay on Population" is preeminently a rhetorical achievement because it (1) originated from controversy; (2) traced and dramatized the effects of a principle that, in Malthus's opinion, was long known but little understood by the public; and (3) drew its power from the evocation and conscious imitation of Newton's…

This study examined the reliability of holistic scoring for a sample of essays written during the Spring 1985 MCAT administration. Analysis of variance techniques was used to estimate the reliability of scoring and to partition score variance into that due to level differences between papers and to context-specific factors. (Author/LMO)

Defining a web as a diagrammatic representation of any logical train of thought, this article describes how to use the web as a tool for teaching and evaluating essays. Provides several web diagrams. (JDH)

This article summarizes some of the testing changes which have taken place in the 'A' level economics course and briefly discusses the current role of the essay paper. States that the essay exam has been particularly effective in measuring higher order thinking skills and discriminating between more and less able students. (JDH)

Defends the CUNY-WAT against the charges made by Fishman (CS 731 865). Offers suggestions for those wishing to undertake research into the choice of topics for writing assessment tests. (FL)

Explains that a good essay question should be as specific in what it asks for as the students are expected to be in their answers. (HOD)

The Connecticut Assessment of Educational Progress assesses writing traits using different approaches to diagnose students' skills. These include multiple choice, direct assessment, "revising test," dictation, and note-taking. These measures and scoring guides are used to assess several elements of good writing. (DWH)

Reports on the views of black children in Soweto about life in their country fifty years from now. (Editor)

GED "Scoreboost" materials target exactly the skills one needs to pass the General Educational Development (GED) tests. This book focuses on the essay writing test. To pass the test, the test taker needs to write an effective essay in 45 minutes and edit pieces of text that have already been written. This workbook shows how the essay…

This report examines the feasibility of scoring essays using computer-based techniques. Essays have been incorporated into many of the standardized testing programs. Issues of validity and reliability must be addressed to deploy automated approaches to scoring fully. Two approaches that have been used to classify documents, surface- and word-based…

Noun phrases are often used in academic writing to express the abstract character of the topics discussed. Nouns, especially nominalizations, make it possible to express complicated ideas in a condensed and compact manner, whereas the corresponding verbs make texts easier to understand and more dynamic. In this paper, a case study is presented…

This study investigated the practice of weighting a type of test item, such as constructed response, more than other types of items, such as selected response, to compute student scores for a mixed-item type of test. The study used data from statewide writing field tests in grades 3, 5, and 8 and considered two contexts, that in which a single…