The authors consider how portfolios can meet the challenges of assessing various aspects of literacy and student learning. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) specify the knowledge and skills students need for success in college and the workplace--including writing in all content areas. The CCSS attends to range as a core theme in a more…

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of progressive sentence development activities on 5th graders' description skills. The study was conducted based on the pretest-posttest quasi-experimental model with a control group. A total of 58 students participated in the study; 29 in the control group, and 29 in the experimental group. The…

Language tools are reflections of the academic traditions of assessment developers, as well as the perceptions of language quality as held by a society. The certification of Quebec's teachers offers an interesting case in point: the Québec Government's "ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport" (MELS) requires that all students in…

Problems with handwriting can negatively impact the writing of students with learning disabilities. In this article, an example is provided of a fourth-grade special education teacher's efforts to assist a new student by using a problem-solving approach to help determine an efficient course of action for special education teachers who are trying…

Portfolios are one of the alternatives that can be used for writing assessment. Portfolios are not common in the curriculum. The lack of dissemination to language teachers have made portfolios disregarded. In order to encourage teachers to use portfolios for assessment of writing, they need to have adequate information about portfolios, how they…

Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) is a modification of Thurstone's method of comparative judgement that exploits the power of adaptivity, but in scoring rather than testing. Professional judgement by teachers replaces the marking of tests; a judge is asked to compare the work of two students and simply to decide which of them is the better.…

This article offers one potential response to Yancey's (1999) call for a fourth wave of writing assessment able to capture writing development in all of its complexity. Based on an ecological perspective of literate development that situates students' growth as writers across multiple engagements with writing, including those outside of school,…

Writing is a fundamental part of engaging in professional, social, community, and civic activities. Nearly 70 percent of salaried employees have at least some responsibility for writing, and the ability to write "well" is a critical component of being able to communicate effectively to a variety of audiences. Because writing is a…

The essential function of critical thinking in education is obvious by many studies done in this field. The main purpose of this article is to find the relationship between critical thinking levels of Iranian EFL learners and their performance on different modes of writing. The sample of the study selected among those who studying English at the…

Students' reflective essay writing can be stimulated by the formative assessments provided to them by their teachers. Such assessments contain information about the quality of students' reflective writings and offer suggestions for improvement. Despite the importance of formatively assessing students' reflective writings in teacher education…

This study investigates the potential for linguistic microfeatures related to length, complexity, cohesion, relevance, topic, and rhetorical style to predict L2 writing proficiency. Computational indices were calculated by two automated text analysis tools (Coh- Metrix and the Writing Assessment Tool) and used to predict human essay ratings in a…

In this experimental study, 151 middle school students explored 3 historical controversies, first reading and discussing primary source documents in groups, then writing arguments on their own. Students were either randomly assigned to an experimental condition, using argumentative schemes and critical questions as guides during discussions, or to…

Computer technology made its way into writing instruction and assessment with spelling and grammar checkers decades ago, but more recently it has done so with automated essay evaluation (AEE) and diagnostic feedback. And although many programs and tools have been developed in the last decade, not enough research has been conducted to support or…

This study investigates a novel approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines natural language processing approaches that assess text features with approaches that assess individual differences in writers such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining text…

Much research has investigated the role of planning time in second language writing; however, the results show that there are inconsistent findings about the effects of planning time conditions on the complexity of the EFL learners' textual output. The current study attempted to consider the differential effects of planning time conditions in…