A study examined the relationships between the quality of writing on composition examinations and topic selection, outlining, rough drafting, and revision. A sample of 1,372 grade twelve students' essays was examined. Among the issues examined were how topic selection affects the final essay score, if and how selection of topic affects the type or…

Intensive peer review is a method of teaching expository writing developed two years ago by A. N. Doane and now used extensively in freshman expository writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students meet regularly in groups of four three times a week over the course of the term to share and critique each other's writing. The instructor…

The Registered Holistic Scoring Method, which has been used for one year to score the ninth grade writing test of the New Jersey High School Proficiency Test, is described. Registered Holistic Scoring was developed from the previous holistic approach in order to provide more reliable scoring guidelines year after year. Two trained evaluators…

During the 1984-85 school year, pupils in three age groups participated in an international survey to discover ways in which pupils are taught written composition, what they write, and how their achievements are assessed. The three age groups were: (1) those who had reached or were approaching the end of the class-teacher stage, (2) those who had…

This digest draws upon the thirteen published volumes of "Inside English" to offer a summary of practitioners' advice on techniques to improve two-year college students' writing skills. First, the paper summarizes underlying principles of writing instruction, indicating that: (1) usage, formal grammar, phonics, and spelling are best…

Reflecting the general concern about student writing performance, this book is designed to present recent advances in the theory and practice of assessing writing ability to all teachers of writing, as well as writing examiners and administrators. The book explores (1) reconsidering the links between teaching and assessing writing, (2) the…

Under the leadership of the Language Arts Curriculum Committee, the Greater Albany (Oregon) Public Schools conducted its second annual district assessment of writing skills of students in grades 5, 7, 9, and 11, using the "analytic trait scoring" method (ATS). The testing procedure, diagnostic in purpose, conformed to the writing process…

A computer assisted system called PEERRATE was used in a theater history course at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in Newark, in fall 1980, in order to give students an opportunity to anonymously grade one another's written work and to compare their own ratings with those of fellow students and the instructor. The PEERRATE system is a…

A study correlated the results of the Omnibus Personality Inventory (OPI) and two holistically scored narrative writing samples to determine how high school students' intellectual and emotional characteristics affected their writing improvement. Students in a small West Coast high school completed the OPI and generated a pretest writing sample in…

Using data from three studies, this paper focuses on competency education trends in California in the area of writing. The studies reviewed in the paper examined (1) the competency examinations produced by students in one high school in 1980, (2) the various means employed in 1981 by five school districts in the San Francisco Bay area to implement…

To evaluate the impact of revision--as distinct from other writing enrichment activities such as peer or teacher feedback--on writing skills, two classes of college-bound high school seniors who voluntarily enrolled in a writing course, were given similar instruction in writing evaluation and skill development. While both classes were permitted to…

This booklet provides Grade 6 teachers, administrators, and students with samples of students' writing that exemplify the criteria used to score students' written responses on the June 1988 Grade 6 English Language Arts Achievement Test. The writing assignment required students to read the beginning of a story and use their imaginations to…

Because of consistent faculty involvement from its earliest stages, the writing assessment program at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) represents a competent, fair, and useful procedure for the large-scale testing and evaluation of student writing. UMKC's assessment curriculum builds on the existing sequence of three composition…

The graded response (GR) model of Samejima (1969) and the partial credit model (PC) of Masters (1982) were fitted to identical writing samples that were holistically scored. The performance and relative benefits of each model were then evaluated. Writing samples were both expository and narrative. Data were from statewide assessments of secondary…

Writing instruction reflects a growing appreciation of the value of talk. By implementing peer writing groups, teachers encourage students to give, seek, and react to oral feedback among themselves as they write, in addition to reacting to the teacher's traditional comments on finished papers. Collaboration in writing groups provides writers with…