Provides an overview--especially for administrators, developers, and tutors new to electronic tutoring environments--of issues and considerations unique to online tutoring that training programs need to address. Discusses three aspects of online tutoring: appreciating text-only environments, developing procedures for responding online, and…

Promotes honest debate focused upon clearer and more accurate writing. Errors commonly found in texts originate in part by overhasty publication and oversimplification. (SAH)

Describes methods especially suited for large classes of nontraditional students in community college creative writing courses. Suggests that by commenting upon and grading students' written peer responses, the instructor can enlist the class to become a peer audience that thoughtfully writes criticism and comments on each others' work each week.…

Suggests coordinated assessment and intervention strategies that speech language pathologists, special educators, and general educators, in co-teaching or inclusive settings, can use to assist at-risk students to achieve both oral and written linguistic competence. Proposes a strong link between talking and writing in the normal developmental…

Examines criterion-related validity of curriculum-based measures in written expression for secondary students. Finds a combination of measures was better than any single measure for predicting students' general performance in written expression; and 3 measures added to the prediction of students' general writing proficiency (number of characters…

Discusses issues surrounding classroom-based assessment of writing. Describes the author's own experiences in developing and using a formative evaluation system for middle school students with learning problems; and discusses issues related to the linkage between assessment and instruction. Suggests matters of technical adequacy are as important…

Discusses how a writing/design (service learning) assignment in a technical writing class offered an opportunity to investigate differences and similarities in evaluation criteria between the classroom (instructors) and the workplace (clients outside academe). Finds considerable overlap between what instructors and clients emphasized, and large…

This article describes an e-mail pen pal correspondence project and its positive effect on middle school students, including students with disabilities. It reports on a study with 80 students, which found that the students with e-mail pen pals generated significantly more written words than students with traditional pen pals or a control group. An…

The author has always been weary of multiple-choice tests. When she started her teaching career, she was determined to find alternatives to multiple-choice tests. She read as much as she could on alternative assessment. Her interest in developing alternative methods of assessment was further spurred by her teaching mentor, who introduced her to a…

Written analyses of cases help the student develop the skills of logical analysis and written communication. However, students often question the reliability of the grades that they receive. In this study, the author used six criteria to evaluate case analysis by two graders who were team teaching a course. Results show that even with…

In this article, we review methods of writing assessment, focusing specifically on a method designed for special education: curriculum-based measurement. At the elementary and middle school levels, valid and reliable indicators of performance have been identified. At the high school level, research is sparse and has not yet supported the validity…

Students in Grades 5 and 8 completed a 30-minute writing performance assessment and a writing performance assessment completed over 3 days. Assessments were evaluated on four traits (ideas, organization, conventions, and sentence fluency). A significant interaction was found at Grade 5 between length of time allotted for the assessment and…

Academic assessment of their coursework is of great importance to undergraduate students. Yet little attention has been paid to the perceptions of undergraduate writing that academics draw on in their assessment practices and the ways in which these perceptions may be gendered. This article reports findings from a study that asked lecturers about…

Although most portfolio evaluation currently uses some adaptation of holistic scoring, the problems with scoring portfolios holistically are many, much more than for essays, and the problems are not readily resolvable. Indeed, many aspects of holistic scoring work against the principles behind portfolio assessment. We have from the start needed a…

Grading papers may be one of the most stressful, most time consuming, and least rewarding activities in which professors engage. Although effective grading techniques for papers have been widely researched, especially within the "Writing" or "English" scholarly arenas, has this information been put into practice? The goals of this paper are…