This handbook is one of a series developed by the Texas Education Agency in response to requests to provide schools with additional information concerning the written composition portion of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). The handbook focuses on exit level grades 9 through 12. Following an introduction, the handbook is in two…

A high school English teacher found that one easy way to keep the idea of positive reinforcement foremost in her mind when she works with students was to use writing portfolios. A Portfolio Assessment project was designed in which portfolios were used in two sophomore and two junior regular English classes. A flexible plan was developed for using…

Educators are expressing the pros and cons of portfolio programs and their assessment. Teachers should be among the policy makers, and teacher-training institutions should bear their share of preparing teachers in all aspects of portfolio programs, including testing. Decade after decade, in both elementary and secondary education, students'…

Anecdotal testimony indicates that grade deflation is encouraged in many colleges and universities, especially in freshman writing courses. As a result, grading down has become a point of pride for some writing instructors. Instead of earning reputations as good, caring, committed teachers whose students do well because the teachers have worked…

This pilot project had four goals: (1) to develop a writing rubric with kindergartners; (2) to have students write to a prompt and record observed behaviors for analysis; (3) to better understand the appropriateness of using a writing rubric with kindergartners; and (4) to form more effective ways for students to be more autonomous in their…

At the intersection of teaching and learning, this guide is intended to introduce and update disciplinary faculty on contemporary writing principles and pedagogy. In addition, it is designed to: alert faculty to the ways in which effective writing helps students not only show what they have learned but also to learn, generate, and communicate…

The objectives of this study were to determine whether student writing portfolios could be rated reliably by trained judges; study the effects on student ratings of the differential leniency of the judges; and ascertain the effects of writing-prompt difficulty and its interactions with rater leniency. Writing samples from 127 students in grades 3,…

Recent research creates a better understanding of how writing is best learned, taught, and used for learning in school and life. Research done by Anne Haas Dyson and Carol Stack has indicated that many low-income African American children may bring resources to school that are often overlooked. Matthew Downey moves from Dyson's findings about how…

Negative attitudes toward collaborative writing are common, especially in the humanities, and some people view it as a form of plagiarism or cheating. Plagiarism, or the borrowing of ideas from other writers, can be both conscious and unconscious, and can stem from a variety of motives. Even single-authored works are products of many minds,…

Writing teachers are constantly confronted with the problem of forming effective responding strategies to help student writing improve. Even though the way writing is taught has shifted from a product- to a process-oriented approach, teachers' responding practices seem particularly resistant to modification. "Practitioner lore" suggests…

Students at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, Tennessee do every kind of writing, have won numerous writing awards, and have published everything from chapbooks to articles in national literary magazines. According to the creative writing teacher, students are first taught to write about things they know--to go back to their own…

When the state legislators of Illinois mandated a full-scale statewide assessment program in reading/language arts, the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE) made its stand clear: that tests for Illinois students must be created, designed, and executed by Illinois English/language arts educators, and that a writing sample was an…

A total of 47 twelfth grade students from five different English classes and the six teachers in the English department at a secondary school in Canada took part in a study to determine what effects traditional grade-based writing evaluation procedures had upon the process of writing. There were three distinct yet related components to the…

The tendency to read for errors is an occupational hazard for writing teachers, but there is something profoundly wrong in measuring progress by measuring the reduction of errors. To begin breaking this habit, teachers must first recognize the fundamental hypocrisy in making correction markings that are at odds with the intended message (i.e.,…

Writing research has long sought to identify the internal features of written discourse that help to explain qualitative differences among student texts. Reflecting the theories of the Prague School linguists, this study used a topical structure analysis to distinguish between the sentences and T-units of 48 college freshman essays evaluated as…