Students in grades 5 and 8 completed a state writing assessment, and their first and final drafts on the extended writing portion of the test were copied and scored using the state writing rubric. The rubric consisted of three primary traits: Content and Organization, Style and Fluency, and Language Use. Scorers were blind to the study purpose and…

Does revision of graded essays for an electronic portfolio improve First-Year Composition students' scores from anonymous raters? In a sample of 450 paired essays, 46 percent improved by one or more points on a six-point scale, 28 percent remained the same, and 26 percent declined by one or more points. (Contains 3 figures, 1 table, and 7 notes.)

Electronic portfolios have developed as a medium for learning that makes use of the learners' own reflections on connections among portfolio artifacts. This study used a portfolio-based, mid-program reflection of undergraduate students to elaborate a framework for reflective learning and raise questions about related assessment practices.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of task-based writing instruction, a communicative language-teaching method, on second language acquisition and differentiation of instruction for English language learners during the independent work time instructional component of the Open Court Reading program. Through student-teacher…

Since Sinclair (1991) concretized the possibilities of processing and analyzing large quantities of text data through corpus linguistic techniques, the applications of corpus linguistic approaches employing authentic language data and empirical evidence have been widely accepted in language teaching and research. As the applications of corpus…

The purpose of this study was to investigate problems and potentials of new technologies in English writing education. The effectiveness of automated writing evaluation (AWE) ("MY Access") and of peer evaluation (PE) was compared. Twenty-two English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Taiwan participated in this study. They submitted…

Testing the hypotheses that reflective timed-essay prompts should elicit memories of meaningful experiences in students' undergraduate education, and that computer-mediated classroom experiences should be salient among those memories, a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods paints a richer, more complex picture than either…

Large-scale writing programs can add value to the traditional timed writing assessment by using aspects of the essays to assess the effectiveness of institutional goals, programs, and curriculums. The "six learning goals" prompt in this study represents an attempt to provide an accurate writing assessment that moves beyond scores. This…

Describes, via a dialogic format, background and current practices in teaching and assessing writing in secondary schools in the People's Republic of China, as well as issues involved in assessing student writing on the current national university examinations. Suggests comparisons with similar issues and practices in the United States. (SR)

Describes the use of WordStar, Grammatik, and Proofreader software packages to evaluate students' writing in a business communications course. Shows how spelling and selected prose characteristics can be evaluated by computer. (SK)

Discusses the lack of professional agreement as to which components of writing should be evaluated and how. Offers eight suggestions as guidelines for writing evaluation. (HTH)

Among the scoring procedures investigated, Total Words Written, Words Spelled Correctly, Correct Letter Sequences, and Mature Words most strongly and consistently related to the criterion measures. (DB)

Describes a technique to create, administer, and monitor valid and reliable measures of basic students' writing skills. Shows how the test, requiring students to read a stimulus passage and prepare a written response, uses judgments of experienced language teachers to measure students' writing proficiency. Includes a sample exit-test prompt. (MM)

Claims that portfolios can be reliably rated in a large-scale assessment situation. Shares the experiences of writing program administrators concerning portfolio assessment. Outlines practical methods of gaining reasonable reliability in portfolio scoring. (RS)

Describes the difficulties in assessing writing improvement in high school students based on national reports. Discovers that students' fluency, their use of dialogue, and their ease in moving between the abstract and the concrete is increasing. Suggests the resources of the National Assessment of Educational Progress might yield the information…