During the summer of 1990, a university English education professor in Indiana responded to the writing of 20 fourth through seventh graders via a computer installed in his home. The students wrote daily anything ranging from a 3-line haiku to 10-20 computer-screen stories. The classroom teacher took the students through the steps in the writing…

A roundtable session at the 1992 Conference on College Composition and Communication explored the effects of portfolio evaluation on composition students, English faculty, and departmental administrators at two- and four-year campuses of the University of Alaska Southeast. Faculty from both four-year and two-year campuses found that portfolio…

To address the need for writing assessment tools, two analytic measures for evaluating managerial writing were used: the Analysis of Argument Measure based on Toulmin's (1958) elements of an argument, and the Persuasive Adaptiveness Measure, which draws on the Delia, Kline, and Burleson (1979) ranking system for scoring the degree of social…

A study examined the influence of two different writing tasks on the ways in which students evaluate arguments on one controversial issue. Subjects, 20 first-year college students, evaluated 2 argumentative articles on the issue of drug legalization. Subjects rated the strength of the argument of each paragraph as they read. Ten of the subjects…

The principal goals of the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport's large-scale writing assessment are to determine if a writing program actually helps students to write better and, if so, whether that growth can be measured during the college years. Portfolio assessment has become an attractive alternative to single-test essay at SUNY…

Recognizing that increasing pressure for greater accountability has accompanied recent economic changes, this book presents 11 articles on literacy evaluation and assessment. They are: (1) "Evaluation: A Political Issue" (Wendy Crebbin); (2) "Understanding Evaluation" (Kaye Lowe and Bill Bintz); (3) "A Difficult Balance:…

Noting that Oregon has been a pioneer in developing assessments which require actual student writing, this booklet includes a collection of student essays and shows how they were evaluated by teachers. The sample essays in the booklet are useful in staff development activities and may also be shared with students, serving as models to help…

Noting that Oregon has been a pioneer in developing assessments which require actual student writing, this booklet includes a collection of student essays and shows how they were evaluated by teachers. The sample essays in the booklet are useful in staff development activities and may also be shared with students, serving as models to help…

This paper presents a model of scored cognition that incorporates two types of mental models: models of performance (i.e., the criteria for judging performance) and models of scoring (i.e., the procedural scripts for scoring an essay). In Study 1, six novice and five experienced scorers wrote definitions of three levels of a 6-point holistic…

A study examined sex differences among peer writing tutors concerning the use of discipline-specific terms and the suggestion of revision strategies. Subjects, four male tutors, four female tutors, four male students, and four female students, were tape recorded for 11 minutes during one-on-one same-sex and opposite-sex peer conferences.…

Providing information to help develop students' sense of narrative and to show them specific test-taking strategies, this publication is helpful to teachers as they ready their students for the North Carolina Fourth Grade Writing Assessment. The publication provides materials on generating ideas for writing, selecting topics, revising, developing…

This guide, made up of transparencies and text, offers a basis for a 2-day interactive inservice presentation on how to teach writing, to help a school district ensure that its English language arts program addresses the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test. In addition to sections on the use of the guide and the format of the TAAS…

This collection of student essays provides illustrations of the criteria used to grade the composition portion of the sixth-grade achievement test used in Alberta (Canada). An introductory section describes the procedures for selecting the essays used, establishing scoring norms, and scoring the tests, and offers general comments on the writing…

A many-faceted Rasch model (FACETS) is presented for the measurement of writing ability. The FACETS model is a multivariate extension of Rasch measurement models that can be used to provide a framework for calibrating both raters and writing tasks within the context of writing assessment. A FACETS model is described based on the current procedures…

A study examined whether teachers in different personality type groups respond to student writing in different, possibly predictable ways. Nine teaching assistants at Florida State University responded to student essays and took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which measures several personality preferences. Using the MBTI scores, the…