Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

Reflective writing is an important educational practice to train reflective thinking. Currently, researchers must manually analyze these writings, limiting practice and research because the analysis is time and resource consuming. This study evaluates whether machine learning can be used to automate this manual analysis. The study investigates…

Graduate students face writing anxiety and low self-efficacy regarding writing research papers. Holladay (1981) addressed the negative characteristics of anxiety in graduate students by writing: "They are frightened by a demand for writing competency, they fear evaluation of their writing because they think they will be rated negatively, they…

Learning communities (LCs) represent a high impact practice in higher education with marked benefits for all stakeholders. In general education composition courses, learning communities can provide key support for students. This paper provides an example of a mixed-methods assessment design, and its consequent revision due to the COVID-19…

We report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their "rhetorical training"--their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in…

Learning to write is a complex process and children have to orchestrate a range of processes and skills in order to produce written messages. Young children are facing increasing demands in terms of the expected complexity of their written messages in education settings across the world. Teachers, in turn, are challenged to support children and…

Keystroke logs provide a comprehensive record of observable writing processes. Previous studies examining the keystroke logs of young L1 English writers performing experimental writing tasks have identified writing processes features predictive of the quality of responses. Contrarily, large-scale studies on the dynamic and temporal nature of L2…

This paper describes the enlargement of the initial conception of formative assessment with reference to constructivist, sociocultural and situated theories of learning and the concept of co-regulation. It reviews research on student involvement in formative assessment practices (self-assessment, peer assessment, whole-class discussions of…

Reliability and validity are two important topics that have been studied for many decades in the educational measurement field, including discussions of Writing Studies' subfield of writing assessment, since the establishment of the College Entrance Exam Board [CEEB] in 1899 (Huot et al., 2010). In recent years, scholarly conversations of fairness…

Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal of this research was to examine the dimensionality of composition skills in kindergarten children, thereby adding to current knowledge about the measurement of young…

The present study adopted a case-study qualitative design to discover how science undergraduates at one public university in the eastern U.S. understood writing and how they evaluated creative or personal writing in relation to their science identities. Findings suggest that science majors in this volunteer sample defined science writing as…

This article reports an initiative to improve student writing by incorporating technology-based structured peer review in the revision process. Although the most important step of writing, the revision step, is overlooked by students for several reasons. We describe a successful 10-week long intervention with students from upper-level…

Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal of this research was to examine the dimensionality of composition skills in kindergarten children, thereby adding to current knowledge about the measurement of young…

In lived experience, the two processes of secondary research and writing overlap and intertwine interminably, creating an overarching complex system as research becomes expressed in writing and writing generates new research. This classroom study explores the two processes as one--the research-writing process--through coding of student journal…

If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by "improvement imperatives" that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism," then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a…