Traditional tests fall into two categories, both of which have several advantages and disadvantages that need to be considered when determining the type of test to use. Constructed-response tests, such as essay tests, ask students to construct their own responses. Thus, students are required not only to recall but to organize and often apply…

Direct assessment of writing skill, usually considered to be synonymous with assessment by means of writing samples, is reviewed in terms of its history and with respect to evidence of its reliability and validity. Reliability is examined as it is influenced by reader inconsistency, domain sampling, and other sources of error. Validity evidence is…

This study compared essay scores from paper-based and computer-based versions of a writing test for prospective teachers. Scores for essays in the paper-based version averaged nearly half a standard deviation higher than those in the computer-based version, after applying a statistical control for demographic differences between the groups of…

The Alberta, Canada, Social Studies examination for grade 12 contains 70 multiple choice questions covering the following subjects: political ideologies, economics, world geography, world history, and current events. The questions are often related to political cartoons, charts, maps, or a series of quotations that precede the question(s). Two…

A study explored how writers with extensive experience and learning in an academic discipline used both topical and rhetorical knowledge to construct synthesis essays. Subjects, 20 psychology graduate students and 20 business graduate students, wrote synthesis essays on either the topics of "supply-side economics" or "rehearsal in…

Contradictions are inherent in the evaluation of placement test writing, contradictions that at once value and devalue writers and writing, readers and reading. In testing, the evidence for the essay's effectiveness rests almost entirely on the writer's choice of linguistic forms. The characteristics that distinguish evaluation in competency…

In 1977, the Dallas, Texas Independent School District modified its teacher selection criteria. In addition to the previously used evaluation criteria involving transcripts, references and evaluations, three new measures were employed: (1) a test of verbal and quantitative ability, the Wesman Personnel Classification Test (WPCT), which was later…

While vocabulary is the concern of beginning students of English as a second language (ESL) and essays are the focus of advanced students, syntax is the domain of the intermediate course, with an emphasis on sentence combining. One method divides the course into four segments: (1) using, varying, and rearranging connectors; (2) ordering thoughts…

Various approaches have traditionally been used to evaluate college students' writing performance. The College Outcome Measures Program (COMP), designed to assess and improve college programs, offers new ways to collect writing samples that include responses to reasoning and problem solving tasks. Thus, the effectiveness of written communication…

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written…

Using self-instructional strategy training procedures, three sixth-grade learning disabled students were taught a series of self-directed prompts designed to facilitate the generation, framing, and planning of written compositions. The eight-step instructional procedure included pretraining, review of baseline performance level, description of the…

A sample of l34 adults enrolled in adult education programs for credit ranked types of test items. From most to least preferred, the five types of test item were multiple choice, true/false, matching, fill-in-the-blank, and essay. Respondents also explained which type of test item contributed to anxiety for them. Vaguely written essay questions…

How writing teachers get students from the personal-experience theme, with its many colloquial terms, to the formal essay seems to be a national issue. Teachers are under pressure to do the thing that colleges seem to value most--to teach the kind of essay that corresponds to term papers or essay questions. Colleges emphasize this because it is…

A follow-up study of two instruments for evaluating college writing was conducted. The experimental scale (E Scale) was developed in 1976 and revised for this study. The control scale (C Scale) was described in the literature in 1977. Ten English majors graded ten essays from diagnostic entrance exams. Both the E Scale and the C Scale were used,…

The writing assignments developed for a course in expository writing intended for gifted eighth grade students are described in this paper. The first assignment described is a causal analysis essay that required the students to examine events from their lives or from newspaper articles and analyze the causes of the actions involved. The paper…