Describes how a sixth-grade teacher turned sluggish Friday afternoons into student writing workshops. Students wrote essays on topics of their own choosing, exchanged papers with classmates to correct spelling and grammar, and provided each other with suggestions to improve the essays. Over the course of the school year, student writing improved…

The congruence among students' predictions of grades before taking short-answer and essay tests, their estimations of grades after taking the tests, and the actual grades was studied for 69 college students. There was a significant, but slight, positive relationship between students' judgments and their actual grades. (SLD)

Reports that a goal and item analysis of eight history and systems of psychology textbooks and their accompanying test item files showed that the majority of the essay test items are too narrow in scope to measure the commonly stated course goals. Presents some integrative and goal-relevant essay questions to rectify this shortcoming. Includes a…

This study compared the analytic scores on an essay test of clinical judgment generated by nonphysician readers with those of physician readers. Generalizability theory was applied to determine the number of essays and scorers required to reach specified levels of reproducibility. Results suggested that with training nonphysicians could…

Considers how writing teachers can help students become more inventive writers. Gives different techniques for developing invention skills. Outlines an approach for fostering invention in writing. (HB)

Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is presented as way that middle school students with learning disabilities can learn task-specific strategies for composing. A strategy for planning expository essays is discussed, along with the PLAN and WRITE strategies for teaching basic parts of an essay, different types of sentences, synonyms, and…

Using a recruitment test for Korean teachers, the use of the Rasch measurement model to control the effects of judge variable on the grading of essay-type items is examined. Ways of minimizing the variation of grading due to judge severity and reducing the number of judges without threatening objectivity of ability measurements are presented.…

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…

Identifies a set of writing conventions whose primary function is to monitor the development of a crucial component of narrative, the crisis of the story, but that are also customarily used by skilled writers to enhance the attention-getting power of their expository writing. Shows that English-as-a-Second-Language learners who have not learned to…

Explored an alternative approach to short essay writing on language assessment tasks. Thirty-nine intermediate learners of French performed two essay writing tasks: writing directly in French and writing in the first language and then translating into French. Two-thirds of students did better on the direct writing task across all rating scales;…

Presents remarks from panel members on the subject of student performance assessments. Panelists' comments include equity issues; assessment as a tool for teaching and learning and as a necessary reflection of learning goals; the issue of "multiple intelligences"; student participation in assessments; and the uses of portfolio assessment…

Advocates a concordance- and genre-based approach to academic essay writing for non-native students. Describes a project that aimed to teach undergraduate law students to write formal legal essays. Students identified structural characteristics and used concordances to explore possible correlations between the generic structures and particular…

Examines the conditions under which using notes while essay-writing is helpful. Reviews the efforts of 226 Finish high school graduates taking an entrance examination to a nursing school. Indicates that the advice to write an essay using spontaneously written notes is not applicable in all situations. (CMK)

Focuses on the impact art teachers have on their students by presenting excerpts from short essays written by undergraduate students in an elementary education methods course. Explains that the students shared memories of their own elementary art experiences in the essays. (CMK)

Summarizes literature on techniques for teaching social stratification. Describes the three parts of an exercise that enables students to understand economic and political inequality: students are given a family scenario, create household budgets, and finally rework the national budget with their family scenario groups. Discusses student…