A college faculty member who has graded Advanced Placement exam essays on U.S. government and politics, taken mostly by high school juniors and seniors, suggests that high school teachers and college faculty who assess the essays are not the best qualified persons to do so and that despite efforts to ensure consistency, the resulting scores are…

A faculty consultant to the Educational Testing Service for advanced placement (AP) test reading in U.S. government and politics responds to an article criticizing essay evaluation methods and criteria, finding in it a fundamental misunderstanding of the AP reading process and explaining why the essays are subject to less scrutiny for style,…

Describes how a semester-long pen-pal project enabled 18 participating university language arts students, a class of first graders, their teacher, and the university instructors to become co-learners in meaningful, action research. Discusses insights about writing derived from the children's weekly letters. Presents an assessment rubric charting…

Explores issues of whose work is actually being evaluated when raters outside the classroom context make judgments about students based on work composed with the support of peers, teachers, and parents. Data from an evaluation of a statewide assessment and a study of scoring elementary school writing portfolios illustrate the issues. (SLD)

Outlines the use of a rubric format to assess student learning in art production. The rubric provides students a visual guide to the successful and deficient areas. It includes areas for comments on preparation, research, assignment goals, craftsmanship, originality, and aesthetics. Recommends student involvement in establishing the evaluative…

Seven teachers, part of an Arts Integration Community of Practice, used rubrics to measure student learning and artistic skills. Examples from five sites, across a variety of academic content areas and age levels, and with students of varying disabilities, are included in this article. Results suggest that rubrics may be a useful tool for…

The Amiel-Tison Neurological Assessment at Term (ATNAT) is part of a set of three different instruments based on a neuro-maturative framework. By sharing a same methodology and a similar scoring system, the use of these three assessments prevents any rupture in the course of high risk children follow-up from 32 weeks post-conception to 6 years of…

A conceptual model was developed in an urban undergraduate education institution in the US to assess teaching performance and intellectual development levels of teacher candidates. Danielson's framework of teaching performance and Perry's pattern of intellectual and ethical development were used for developing a conceptual model. A pilot study was…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written prose (Shermis & Barrera, 2002; Shermis & Burstein, 2003; Shermis, Raymat, & Barrera, 2003). AES systems are mainly used to overcome time, cost, reliability, and generalizability issues in writing assessment (Bereiter, 2003; Burstein,…

This action research report describes a program to increase students' reading comprehension and fluency through the use of guided reading. The targeted population consists of second and fourth grade students in a northwest suburban area of a large city located in the Midwest. The problems of low reading comprehension and fluency scores were…

For many people committed to strong academic standards, the "advanced" high school courses offered through the College Board's Advanced Placement program and, increasingly, the Diploma Programme of the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) represent the curricular gold standard for secondary education. Admissions directors and…

The purpose of the NMSBA technical report is to provide users and other interested parties with a general overview of and technical characteristics of the 2007 NMSBA. The 2007 technical report contains the following information: (1) Test development; (2) Scoring procedures; (3) Summary of student performance; (4) Statistical analyses of item and…

In this study, we investigated a variety of Reader effects that may influence the validity of ratings assigned to AP® English Literature and Composition essays. Specifically, we investigated whether Readers exhibit changes in their levels of severity and accuracy, and their use of individual scale categories over time. We refer to changes in these…

Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…

This proof-of-concept investigation describes a computer-based approach for deriving the knowledge structure of individuals and of groups from their written essays, and considers the convergent criterion-related validity of the computer-based scores relative to human rater essay scores and multiple-choice test scores. After completing a…