This study investigated the effectiveness of a blended learning approach--involving the thesis, analysis, and synthesis key (TASK) procedural strategy; online Edmodo discussions; online message labels; and writing models--on student argumentative writing in a Hong Kong secondary school. It also examined whether the application of digital game…

This research attempts to discuss the validity of introducing the evaluation of students' critical thinking skills (CTS) into the assessment system of college English writing through an empirical study. In this paper, 30 College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) writing samples were collected and analyzed. Students' CTS and the final scores of collected…

While the effects of L1 on L2 have been extensively investigated, the effects of L2 on L1 have been largely ignored. The present study attempted to address this issue by investigating the effects of L2 English on Iranian Bilinguals' L1 writing ability. For this end, 61 participants, 30 bilinguals and 31 monolinguals, were assessed on an…

The goals of teacher education must evolve beyond the teaching of strategies and methods toward a process for beginning teachers' critical interrogation of their social locations and the ways they engage with the realities of teaching and learning. One way that this is accomplished is by incorporating opportunities for community engagement…

Reading-to-write (RTW) tasks are becoming increasingly popular and have already been used in several high-stakes English proficiency exams, either replacing or complementing a prompt-based essay test. However, it is still not clear that what accounts for successful or unsuccessful performance on an integrated reading-writing task is owing to the…

Understanding academic vocabulary is essential to student success in school. Use of academic vocabulary words in writing is considered one of the strongest measures of how well a reader understands a given word. In theory, willingness to use academic vocabulary in writing indicates the complexity of acquiring representations of the word's…

Developed to evaluate secondary school students' writing fluency skills, this study is descriptive in nature and uses a mixed method approach. During the research, the researcher attempted to identify students' abilities to write in terms of quantity and complexity, on the one hand, and also attempted to identify findings on accuracy, the…

Purpose: This paper argues that in a well-organised school with strong leadership and vision coupled with a concerted effort to improve the teaching performance of each teacher, student achievement can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that while macro-effect sizes such as "whole of school" metrics are useful for…

In this research, we investigated the feasibility of implementing the "e-rater"® scoring engine as a check score in place of all-human scoring for the "Graduate Record Examinations"® ("GRE"®) revised General Test (rGRE) Analytical Writing measure. This report provides the scientific basis for the use of e-rater as a…

This article describes a novel variation of the Body of Work method that uses construct maps to overcome problems of transparency, rater inconsistency, and scores gaps commonly occurring with the Body of Work method. The Body of Work method with construct maps was implemented to set cut-scores for two separate K-12 assessment programs in a large…

The paper applies a natural language computational tool to study a potential construct-irrelevant response strategy, namely the use of "shell language." Although the study is motivated by the impending increase in the volume of scoring of students responses from assessments to be developed in response to the Race to the Top initiative,…

A pseudo-experimental study was conducted to examine the link between rater accuracy calibration performances and subsequent accuracy during operational scoring. The study asked 45 raters to score a 75-response calibration set and then a 100-response (operational) set of responses from a retired Graduate Record Examinations[R] (GRE[R]) writing…

We examined reading proficiency, focusing on fluency, in 56 Russian-speaking language minority (LM) students and 56 native Hebrew-speaking (NH) peers. Fifth-grade students completed measures of Hebrew reading accuracy and fluency from word to text level as well as phonological awareness (PA), RAN and vocabulary. LM students read single words less…

An experimental design was adopted in the present study to cross-compare the effect of two formative assessments, namely peer assessment (PA) and teacher assessment (TA), with summative assessment (SA) on the improvement of language learners' writing skill and self-efficacy. Writing excellence was operationalized by structural (grammar), lexical…

Using de-identified data, this study investigated the relationship between racial categories with curriculum-based early writing measures (CBM-W), which included word dictation, picture word sentence writing, and story prompt tasks for over 300 participants in Grades 1, 2, and 3. Words written, words spelled correctly, correct letter sequences,…