The New York State Regents Competency Tests in Writing and Comprehensive Examination in English reflect the belief that the current emphasis on test results mandates that testmakers produce tests that actually test what they purport to test, reflect what educators agree should be taught, and have a beneficial influence on teaching. Prior to the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative validities of four essay scoring systems, reflecting alternative conceptualizations of the writing process, for identifying "competent" writers. Each rater was trained in two of the four scoring systems: General Impression Scoring (GI), Diederich Expository Scale (DES), CSE…

A questionnaire was sent to English instructors in 134 Texas colleges and universities to ascertain their perceptions of entering freshmen's skills in written composition. The variables were type of institution, admission policy, enrollment, and teaching experience. Respondents were asked to indicate their perceptions of the number of entering…

Two methods of evaluating student writing were compared. Holistic evaluation attempts to assess the overall quality of a composition. It is a guided procedure for sorting or ranking written composition. A rater scores the composition by placing it within the range of papers produced in response to a given assignment. Scoring may also be done using…

Program Analysis and Monitoring (PAM) in Writing is a decision-support tool which provides the principal with an informative report, the Program Analysis Report, that identifies needs and suggests solutions to problems in educational writing programs. The Report relates information on student achievement in writing to information on how resources…

These three booklets include the writing assessment tests of the Wisconsin Pupil Assessment Program for grades 5, 8, and 11. The first exercise in each booklet is the writing of a story using a photograph as the stimulus. The second exercise is the revision of a story written previously. The eleventh grade test also includes a third exercise:…

The complexity of writing as a skill domain and the lack of consensus about its components have engendered much controversy about the type, length, or number of tasks that should be administered in a given test form and even about whether some aspects of composition require direct assessment through writing samples. Acknowledging this, a study was…

Research has shown that freshman composition teachers often discriminate against students by giving better grades to longer papers or to papers that are clean and legible. Studies have also shown that teachers consider females to be more capable at verbal skills and to have neater handwriting. Since teachers expect low writing anxiety in females…

Stockton State College, New Jersey, recognizes that the teaching of writing is not the responsibility of the English department alone, but of the entire college faculty. Stockton's writing across the curriculum project is designed to give all faculty members general theoretical information and practical training in writing instruction and the…

This report documents the Hawaii Writing Assessment, which was undertaken to identify the writing strengths and weaknesses of Hawaii's public school children in kindergarten through grade twelve and to provide a basis for improvement in curriculum and instruction. The two sections of the report contain an overview of the assessment effort and…

Many teachers of basic writing are preoccupied with error. Before marking any errors in a student's composition, the teacher should read it carefully, try to understand the student's intention in writing it, and respond in those terms. Priorities for analysis should be consistent with the teacher's priorities for teaching and be set in terms of…

Based on the assumption that anxiety is not productive for composition students and that grades are frequently a source of anxiety for those students, a study was conducted to test whether grades and the way they were presented or withheld would create anxiety that would directly affect students' progress in composition. Seventy-four students,…

A five-week tutorial minicourse offered by the Douglas/Cook College Writing Center at Rutgers University helps students develop skills in research writing. The first service the Writing Center offers is a "term paper strategy session," in which students meet with a reference librarian to examine the various reference sources available.…

This book describes a procedure for scoring writing samples with holistic methods and for analyzing the results with methods from primary trait scoring, analytical scoring, and discourse scoring. Following an introduction, the four chapters in the book focus on (1) the selection of topics to be used in a writing assessment, (2) the format for…

This study examined persuasive writing samples of 20 severely hearing-impaired high school students using a feature analytical scoring guide. Results indicate significant differences in content and linguistic considerations between relatively good and poor writers and similarities in surface mechanics. Implications and classroom applications of…