Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years,…

This article reports on a design experiment in which 4th grade bilingual students were invited to engage in new literacy practices of linking, multimodality, and design using only ordinary, concrete materials like ink, paper, tape, and boxes. The inquiry was undertaken in the midst of a unit of study on memoir in a writing workshop, under…

Written essays are a common feature of classroom and high stakes standardized tests at many age levels. However, little is known about how small alterations in the writing task affect students' writing, an issue made more important by the increasing use of task alterations for students with disabilities. In the present study, 140 college students…

Nowadays, writing has received a great degree of attention not only because it plays a significant role in transforming knowledge and learning but also in fostering creativity and when acquiring of a special language skill is seen as important, its assessment becomes important as well and writing is no exception. This study intended to investigate…

This dissertation was designed to examine the effects of a site-based teacher mentoring program on teacher confidence and effectiveness in an elementary school in Florida. Based on preliminary data, there was a need for system organizational change to improve teacher confidence and performance with the district's Document Based Question (DBQ)…

Automated scoring by means of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been introduced lately to improve the traditional human scoring system. The purposes of the present study were to develop a LSA-based assessment system to evaluate children's Chinese sentence construction skills and to examine the effectiveness of LSA-based automated scoring function…

This study investigated the effects of English and Chinese phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) on English reading achievement and the evidence for cross-linguistic transfer in Chinese English-immersion students. English PA was a significant predictor of English reading achievement for immersion students in Grades 2 and 4. There was…

I use Burkean analysis to show how neoliberalism undermines faculty assessment expertise and underwrites testing industry expertise in the current assessment scene. Contending that we cannot extricate ourselves from our limited agency in this scene until we abandon the familiar "stakeholder" theory of power, I propose a rewriting of the…

The latest word about the new SAT is this: It gives colleges about the same information as the old one did. Last week, the College Board announced that the recent changes in the SAT had not substantially altered how accurately it predicts first-year grades. The news prompted applause from the test's proponents, scorn from its critics, and little…

Self-assessment has gained much attention in recent years owing to graving emphasis on learner independence and learner autonomy and self-assessment has significant pedagogic value (Mrudula, 2002). The present study was an attempt to investigate whether self-assessment impact Iranian EFL learners' writing skill. To fulfil the purpose of the study,…

Writing is one of the four skills in language learning and it should be paid more attention. In this regard, creating contexts which is value coherence in pragmatic level, and cohesion in semantic level is important. Knowledge about the discourse Markers (DMs), amongst other things, be used to improve writing skill. DMs are expression such as…

Integrated writing tasks that involve different language modalities such as reading and listening have increasingly been used as means to assess academic writing. Thus, there is a need for understanding how test-takers coordinate different skills to complete these tasks. This study explored second language writers' strategy use and its…

Writing as one important skill in language proficiency demands validity, hence high schools are real places in which valid results are needed for high-stake decisions. Unrealistic and non-viable tests result in improper and invalid interpretation and use. Illustrations without any written research have proved their effectiveness in whatsoever…

This study examined the effects of marking method and rater experience on ESL (English as a Second Language) essay test scores and rater performance. Each of 31 novice and 29 experienced raters rated a sample of ESL essays both holistically and analytically. Essay scores were analysed using a multi-faceted Rasch model to compare test-takers'…

The purpose of this study is to examine the interactions among measurement theories, writing theories, and writing assessments in the United States from an historical perspective. The assessment of writing provides a useful framework for examining how theories influence, and in some cases fail to influence actual practice. Two research traditions…