A composition teacher at Northwest Missouri State University completely redesigned the freshman composition course to include writing portfolios while meeting state requirements for direct assessment and allaying departmental fears. A unit on language history and a half-dozen literature selections were dropped in favor of timed, in-class essay…

The portfolio approach to teaching writing brings the writing process into the classroom and enables the new teacher--and all teachers--to see writing from a new perspective, to truly be collaborators and coaches with their students. A college writing teacher uses portfolios and plays the role of evaluator as well as the responder in three courses…

A study examined whether student-constructed grading criteria complicate or reduce teacher or programmatic standards and determined whether written criteria actually drive students' writing and revising processes. Published criteria for evaluating compositions in 22 college and university writing programs across the nation were analyzed. In terms…

Allowing, or encouraging, students to write fiction has not received much attention from college composition teachers, despite recent attempts to bridge the gaps between composition and the study of literature. Based on experiences with a number of students in a variety of writing courses, a college composition instructor questions assumptions…

To assess the written and verbal communication skills of the approximately 100 deaf and hard-of-hearing students attending the College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a real challenge. The only way for most of these students to satisfy the College of Business' general writing competency requirement was to take the…

Due to concern for test security and fairness, three new performance-based English placement test writing prompts were developed in a large midwestern university for incoming students of English as a second language, and the degree of prompt variability was investigated from multiple perspectives, including "fit-to-specification,"…

Noting that statewide writing assessment shows the achievements of Oregon students over the last decade, this booklet explains the results for the 1993-1997 assessments and provides papers illustrating the work that Oregon students in grades 3 and 5 produce on the state test. The booklet's chapters are: (1) The History of Writing Assessment in…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continuously monitors the knowledge, skills, and performance of U.S. children and youth in a variety of academic subjects. The data collected are available in a series of major reports. The NAEP Facts series takes selected data from these reports and uses them to highlight specific issues of…

A ethnographic study examined the ways a young child's mind grasps the idea of the written word. The 5-year-old subject, called "Craig" in this article, had an unending thirst for print, read at the second grade level, and had fluent speech and vocabulary. Craig was followed over the previous 8-month period from the time he first gained…

An examination was made into cohesion in expository essays written in Malay and in English as a Second Language (ESL) by Malaysian writers. T-tests performed on the data obtained from a cohesion analysis of text indicated no differences in the amount of cohesion between good and weak compositions written in Malay by native speakers (n=20), or in…

Designed to meet the needs of children of various age and ability levels, this book provides teachers of grades 4-9 with over 250 writing activities and reproducible worksheets for teaching students how to write effective compositions, essays, stories, poems, and more. Activities in the book focus on the various stages of the writing process,…

Writing autobiographies, in which students describe their experiences as writers, show that students already know a great deal about their strengths and weaknesses as writers and about the conditions they need to write successfully. Typical first assignments given to entering college students are often used to diagnose the ability level and…

Evaluative criteria implicit in written comments on student writing can embody a definition of text which leads students to see text as superficial and formal instead of deep and meaningful. Students develop their perceptions of professors' values from the cues they receive via comments. A major problem, especially among faculty from different…

A study identified stages of student writing maturation across several grades and developed classroom resources to enhance the maturation of students. A total of 3,600 essays written by students in grades 4 and 6-12 attending urban and rural schools in eastern Ontario, Canada, were holistically scored. The original limited and quite specific…

Reflecting some of the emerging issues sustaining debate in secondary school literature instruction and writing instruction, this newsletter presents articles that discuss the impact of E. D. Hirsch's book "Cultural Literacy,""authentic discourse," and collaborative classroom research. Articles in the newsletter are:…