Multiple-choice tests of punctuation and usage are used throughout the United States to assess the writing skills of new community college students in order to place them in either a basic writing course or first-year composition. To determine whether using the COMPASS Writing Test (CWT) is a valid placement at a community college, student test…

Even though many writing scales have been developed, instructors, educational administrators or researchers may have to develop new scales to fit their specific testing situation. In so-doing, one of the initial steps to be taken is to determine the evaluative criteria on which the scale is supposed to be based. As a part of a project that was…

Alternative approaches are discussed for use of e-rater[R] to score the TOEFL iBT[R] Writing test. These approaches involve alternate criteria. In the 1st approach, the predicted variable is the expected rater score of the examinee's 2 essays. In the 2nd approach, the predicted variable is the expected rater score of 2 essay responses by the…

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) refers to a delay in motor development that does not have any known medical cause. Studies conducted in English speaking societies have found that children with DCD display a higher co-occurrence rate of learning difficulties (e.g., problems in reading and writing) than typically developing (TD) children.…

This article presents a review of the "Test of Written Language-Fourth Edition" (TOWL-4), a newly updated individual or group-based measure of written language for students aged 9 years, 0 months through 17 years, 11 months. The stated purposes of the measure are to identify students in need of support or intervention in the area of…

In 2005, the College Board added a required writing section to the SAT, and ACT added an optional writing test to the ACT. Before 2005, ACT and the College Board had periodically produced concordance tables to assist admission officers who wanted to understand how students of comparable ability would score on the two college entrance examinations.…

Due to a rapid development and expansion of technology and, as a result, Web 2.0 technologies are providing both teachers and learners with new solutions to the limitations of traditional method in the field of language teaching and learning. The research compared students' writing ability before and after they were taught through blog, a new…

This study examined whether relationships exist between Hispanic fourth-grade students' anxiety and test performance on a state-mandated writing assessment. Quantitative methodologies were employed by using test performance and survey data from 291 participants. While no significantly direct relationship exists between students' levels of anxiety…

Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the English Language Learner (ELL) pull out program on student achievement. Schools are facing the unprecedented challenge to educate a multicultural and multilingual student body with varied abilities and backgrounds of learning. The independent variables in this study were the…

The "Common European Framework of Reference" (CEFR; Council of Europe, 2001) provides a competency model that is increasingly used as a point of reference to compare language examinations. Nevertheless, aligning examinations to the CEFR proficiency levels remains a challenge. In this article, we propose a new, level-centered approach to…

The authors are faculty in history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. What their students want and need, and what the institution's role in the community should be, remain open questions, with policy implications at the departmental, college, city, and even national level. Indeed, President Obama…

Few studies have looked at the consequences of standardized writing tests to students' understanding of what it means "to be" a competent writer. Using research techniques drawn from performance studies and art therapy, this qualitative study of middle class, honors students invited them to explore their understanding of what it means to…

With the increasing use of integrated tasks in assessing writing, more and more research studies have been conducted to examine the construct validity of such tasks. Previous studies have largely focused on reading-writing tasks, while relatively little is known about graph-writing tasks. This study examines second language (L2) writers'…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether asking third grade students in one school district in the Metro Detroit area to draw a picture of a narrative story idea before writing about it would improve the points earned on the Michigan standardized writing assessment (MEAP test). One half, or four out of eight, of the…