The assessment of student writing is an essential task for writing teachers, and yet many graduate programs do not require students to take a course in assessment or evaluation, and courses on teaching writing often devote only a limited amount of time to the discussion of assessment. Furthermore, teachers frequently need to prepare their students…

Since the 1980s, composition studies have considered the steps to be taken before assessment: designing the test essay question. While large-scale assessment has little control over writing variables (such as students' learning styles, their reading ability, and their interpretation of the topic), the content or the topic of the writing prompt and…

Two kinds of instruments, atomistic versus holistic, offer different approaches to the grading of writing. This paper briefly discusses the pros and cons of these two philosophies of grading. In addition, the paper presents a holistic, primary-trait scoring instrument that has been used successfully to judge editorials by breaking down the…

Inviting teachers, students, and parents into the portfolio process, this book discusses how portfolios can be used effectively in any and every classroom. The book also offers practical suggestions for getting started, pointers on how to manage the process, and a look at the benefits of portfolio assessment. Included in the book are specific…

The goal of persuasive writing is to move the reader to action or to get the reader to refrain from action, and most of the secrets of persuasion can work either way. To get readers to take action, a writer has to appeal to the emotions as much as possible. To get readers to refrain from action, a writer must appeal to the intellect. The secrets…

A study examined whether composition specialists can counterbalance the potential privileging of the assessment perspective, or of self-appointed interpreters of that perspective, through the study of assessment discourse as text. Fourteen assessment texts were examined, most of them journal articles and most of them featuring the common…

To create not a text-bound but a reader-based procedure for identifying global coherence within a discourse, five major writing tasks of 13 college students enrolled in a basic skills composition course were evaluated by three readers--doctoral students and faculty members in English and Reading Education. After choosing the five most and the five…

Eight public examiners in English from the Western Australian Tertiary Admissions Examination marking panel and 103 final-year student teachers graded essays that were experimentally controlled for voice and diction. Control of these independent variables was achieved by providing four rewritten versions of the secondary student essays, each…

One of the goals of higher education is to develop the students' ability to think critically. However, little research has been done to indicate the impact of college on students' critical thinking skills. A study conducted at a midwestern university measured the critical thinking capability of college seniors. Subjects, 37 volunteers derived from…

Intended to familiarize persons with the scoring standards and criteria used for the Georgia Basic Skills Writing Test, this scoring manual is in eight sections: (1) an introduction to the scoring dimensions and scale points; (2) definitions of the four scale points; (3) definitions of scoring dimensions and components (content and organization,…

A central aim in any assessment program is to ensure fair and stable scoring from administration to administration. When administrations are decentralized, not only in location, but in frequency and in logistical configuration, it is imperative to construct training, certifying, and monitoring systems that provide continuity between the original…

In his rhetorical theory, James Kinneavy distinguishes between "aim" and "mode," but his modes do not represent kinds of reality; instead they represent more specific aims on a lower level of abstraction. Although Kinneavy's classification has been useful in the classroom, seeing the modes as specific aims yields even more…

A phenomenological approach was used in a study of three assessment strategies for the evaluation of journals written by speech communication students: (1) analytic assessment strategy; (2) primary trait assessment strategy; and (3) holistic assessment strategy. Completed question-and-answer packets, consisting of 8 to 12 diaries each, written by…

This report provides information drawn from a study that compared two components of the freshman English program at the University of Texas at Austin. The first chapter of the report contains background material and describes the two course components--the analytic option, which emphasizes writing skills in the context of complete pieces of…

Argues that since writing is used to express knowledge in all the social sciences, it ought to become a part of instruction in every social science discipline. Identifies four approaches to incorporating writing in social education and describes specific writing activities for each of the approaches. (Author/BR)