Intended for students taking the Grade 3 Language Arts Achievement Test in Alberta, Canada, this booklet contains the writing portion of the test, which requires the student to write an imaginative composition in response to a brief passage. The booklet contains space both for planning the composition and for writing the finished work. (EL)

Intended for educators seeking information on direct writing assessments, this monograph describes general procedures for planning and conducting a writing assessment and strategies for tailoring that assessment to local needs. The introductory chapter offers a brief comparison of direct and indirect writing assessment methods, highlighting those…

Teachers read student papers with both eager and anxious expectancy about discourse they have caused but not written. Whatever the teachers may have said about what they will look for as they read, they still measure each paper against their ideas about appropriate performances in each of the categories of textual analysis. They are not reacting…

Organized in two parts, this book provides specific guidelines and techniques for planning, conducting, evaluating and using the results of a composition testing program. Part One, intended principally for test administrators, describes specific procedures for carrying out the steps in developing a composition testing program. The steps, organized…

A study was conducted to determine if the one-to-one method of teaching writing devised by R. Garrison was superior to more traditional approaches. Subjects were college students in four sections of freshman composition, two using the Garrison method and two using traditional methods of writing instruction. Analysis of data revealed that students…

Item bias in a multiple-choice test can be detected by appropriate analyses of the persons x items scoring matrix. This permits comparison of groups of examinees tested with the same instrument. The test may be biased if it is not measuring the same thing in comparable groups, if groups are responding to different aspects of the test items, or if…

Summarizing the best current thinking about what classroom approaches produce sound writing experiences in the first eight grades, this book offers teachers a means of checking on their own practices and perceptions about how writing can best be learned. The first chapter of the book presents a historical review of authoritative opinion regarding…

This report contains a first evaluation of the Summer Institute on Teaching and Assessing Writing Skills, which was organized to help parents, teachers, and administrators in the Boston (Massachusetts) public schools begin the development of a comprehensive and coordinated writing program for grades kindergarten through twelve in each school…

Until writing researchers understand how students respond to teacher marking techniques in composition, they risk prescribing strategies that waste teachers' instructional time. For this reason a study with a participant/observation methodology was conducted to describe and interpret student responses to writing instruction methods. The five-month…

To determine whether negative or positive criticisms written on children's creative writing would affect the mean number of words and sentences produced, a study was conducted with 31 fourth grade children. The children were divided into two groups: those whose creative writing would receive negative comments and those whose writing would receive…

Freshman composition students at a community college in Maryland participated in a study to determine whether the talk-write method of writing instruction would have a more positive effect on freshman writing than would more conventional methods of instruction. Four classes totaling 58 students were randomly divided into an experimental and a…

The Basic Skills Assessment (BSA) is a national secondary level testing program which provides secure tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. It is designed to identify students who need additional instruction in the basic skills so they may be helped to reach the school district's secondary school graduation requirements. One of the BSA's…

A study was conducted to examine the relationship between apprehension and the quality of writing when that writing was aimed at a distant and at a familiar audience. Fifty-eight freshman English students from a two-year college were given a questionnaire to assess their level of writing apprehension. They were then asked to write two in-class…

Experiences with competency testing at the elementary level in the area of English language are presented, as well as suggestions for improving the quality of competency tests. In order to modify curricula and requirements to meet the demands of assessment and to ensure sufficient student instruction, the following suggestions are made: (1)…

The holistic procedure used to score 2,800 student papers in the New Jersey Writing Project is described in this booklet. Characteristics are given of papers that received high, middle, and low scores. It is noted that (1) papers receiving high scores were characterized by a clear understanding of and a direct approach to the assignment, a…