Today, and historically, the presence of WAC/WID programs in the community college setting remains anemic when compared to Ph.D.-granting institutions. This fact is particularly troubling considering the AAC&U's research on high-impact practices and its correlation with WAC/WID theory and practice. This article empirically investigates the…

This paper examines how a team of teachers in a Norwegian upper secondary school responds to, negotiates, and evaluates students' writing in and across different disciplines. The purpose is to identify discourse strategies and professional development as the teachers discuss students' texts, and to explore how the teachers develop a shared…

In an attempt to increase second language (L2) learners' understanding of the benefits associated with the process approach to writing and, more specifically, to gain their appreciation of how their peers might contribute to the quality of their writing, in this study peer revision was modified between two groups of lower-level proficiency L2…

The dangers of a single story in current U.S. large-scale writing assessment are that assessment practice does not align with theory and this practice has negative effects on instruction and students. In this article, I analyze the connections or lack of connections among writing theory, writing assessment, and writing instruction, critique the…

Building on Baddeley's cognitive psychology (2007) and Skehan's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (2009), this article reports a study of the effects of pre-task planning time (strategic planning time) on Malaysian English learners' written narratives elicited by means of a picture composition. 50 first-year undergraduate students studying at…

The authors compared student perceptions of audio and written feedback in order to assess what types of students may benefit from receiving audio feedback on their essays rather than written feedback. Many instructors previously have reported the advantages they see in audio feedback, but little quantitative research has been done on how the…

Assessment of educational outcomes through purchased tests is commonplace in the evaluation of individual student ability and of educational programs. Focusing on the assessment of writing performance in a longitudinal study of first-time, full-time students (n = 598), this research describes the design, use, and assessment of an open-source…

Generally, this descriptive study endeavored to include the voice of adult learners to the scholarly body of research regarding automated writing assessment tools (AWATs). Specifically, the study sought to determine the extent to which students perceive that the AWAT named Criterion fosters learning and if students' opinions differ depending on…

The purpose of this study is to illustrate the use of explanatory models based on Rasch measurement theory to detect systematic relationships between student and item characteristics and achievement differences using differential item functioning (DIF), differential group functioning (DGF), and differential person functioning (DPF) techniques. The…

This study investigated the use of automated essay scoring (AES) to identify at-risk students enrolled in a first-year university writing course. An application of AES, the "Criterion"[R] Online Writing Evaluation Service was evaluated through a methodology focusing on construct modelling, response processes, disaggregation, extrapolation,…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has garnered a great deal of attention from the rhetoric and composition/writing studies community since the Educational Testing Service began using e-rater[R] and the "Criterion"[R] Online Writing Evaluation Service as products in scoring writing tests, and most of the responses have been negative. While the…

This article presents considerations for using automated scoring systems to evaluate second language writing. A distinction is made between English language learners in English-medium educational systems and those studying English in their own countries for a variety of purposes, and between learning-to-write and writing-to-learn in a second…

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of "academic writing" present at these writing programs. Findings suggest…

Rating scales act as the de facto test construct in a writing assessment, although inevitably as a simplification of the construct (North, 2003). However, it is often not reported how rating scales are constructed. Unless the underlying framework of a rating scale takes some account of linguistic theory and research in the definition of…

This article describes a three-step pedagogy aimed at developing college ESL students' ability to assess and evaluate their own writing through intentional learner training. The three pedagogical steps are teacher modeling, guided peer assessment, and independent self-assessment. To illustrate, a set of scaffolded instructional procedures are…