The continuation of an earlier study examined to what extent students change in their use of evaluative criteria in writing between the fifth and sixth grade. Twenty-five students were interviewed in fifth and sixth grade. In the fifth grade, all students were taught writing by the same teacher who emphasized student choice of topic, recursive…

Intended as a guide for college and secondary school educators involved in establishing institutional policy or providing students with academic counseling, this booklet presents basic information about the wide variety of English composition and literature examinations offered by College Board programs. It begins with a description of the role…

The administration of the High School Proficiency Test (HSPT) in the Trenton (New Jersey) School District and the impact of a voluntary summer tutorial program on HSPT scores were examined. New Jersey requires that all ninth graders take the HSPT, and that all school districts achieve a 75 percent passing rate to become state-certified. The same…

To understand the nature of talk in small group writing workshops, including the way talk changes over time and the use students make of such talk, a study analyzed the conversations of 17 inexperienced college writers as they composed and revised self-selected pieces during a one-semester composition course. A student from the course who did not…

A study examined how pragmatic form influences evaluation of student essays in university placement testing. Specifically, the study documented how patterns in students' use of information (assumed to be either old, inferable, or new for readers) affected the holistic scores for quality given to the essays. Subjects, 99 randomly selected entering…

Intended for students taking the English 33 Grade 12 Diploma Examinations in Alberta, Canada, this writing test booklet contains the composition component of the June 1989 tests. During 2.5 hours, students are required to perform the following writing tasks: (1) a personal response to an excerpt from Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth…

Intended for students taking English 30 Grade Diploma Examinations in Alberta, Canada, this writing test booklet contains the composition component of the June 1989 tests. During 2.5 hours, students are required to complete a minor writing assignment in which they give a personal response to William Butler Yeats'"The Fascination of What's…

This package contains articles in three general areas: items covering measurement topics; brief and practical guides on measurement techniques; and professional reading on broader assessment issues. The purpose of these publications by "Set" is to provide research information to teachers. The initial article, "Overview of Issues in…

A study investigated the effects of using daily newspapers to supplement normal classroom instruction with at-risk secondary school students. Subjects, 627 at-risk 8th- through 12th-grade students in 41 intact classes, were assigned to one of three conditions of newspaper usage over an 18-week period. The first group received newspapers three…

Writing tests are part of the mandated statewide proficiency examination in Nevada. The ninth-grade screening test and the eleventh-grade diploma-certifying test require that a student write a paragraph and a business letter, each on an assigned topic and each at an acceptable level of proficiency. Pilot tests, extended discussion, and statistical…

The state of the art in using student portfolios in the schools is summarized, based on an annotated bibliography of over 50 articles produced by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NREL). This set of materials is an addendum to a previously developed workshop series designed to assist educators in developing their own…

A survey was conducted among 489 public colleges in the Southern Regional Education Board states to determine cutting scores for placing students into regular versus remedial college classes. Results indicated a large number and variety of tests in reading, writing, and mathematics--almost 100 combinations of 70 different tests--were used to place…

This report presents the performance for school district categories and for individual school districts on the seventh grade Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) test. The Grade 7 criterion-referenced test contained three sections: mathematics, reading, and writing. Testing was conducted during February 1986. This report is in…

To alleviate the possibility that Florida's College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) is biased against non-native English speakers because of its time limits, additional time was allowed for some samples. CLAST, designed to measure communicative and computational competence in college sophomores, has four subtests: reading, writing, computation,…

The research described in this paper examines the relationship between raters and the training raters receive to apply that rating. The primary concern is maintaining scoring consistency within the context of raters' perceptions. If the criteria for holistic and/or analytic scoring can be recognized as communication based, rather than topic based,…