This paper describes a study of the computer essay-scoring program BETSY. While the use of computers in rating written scripts has been criticised in some quarters for lacking transparency or lack of fit with how human raters rate written scripts, a number of essay rating programs are available commercially, many of which claim to offer comparable…

Students in grades 5 and 8 completed a state writing assessment, and their first and final drafts on the extended writing portion of the test were copied and scored using the state writing rubric. The rubric consisted of three primary traits: Content and Organization, Style and Fluency, and Language Use. Scorers were blind to the study purpose and…

The present study interviewed 16 international students (13 from Mainland China and 3 from Taiwan) in a Canadian university to explore their perceptions and experiences of two standardized English writing tests: the TWE (Test of Written English) and the essay task in LPI (English Language Proficiency Index). In Western Canada, TWE is used as an…

This paper provides information about Alabama High School Graduation Exam, 3rd Edition, a comprehensive standards-based exam. The purpose of the exam is to: (1) Provide schools with student academic diagnostic information; (2) Determine prospective high school graduates' mastery of the state curriculum; (3) Increase alignment of local curriculum…

[Slides] presented at AERA in Denver, CO in April 2010. This study examined the relationship between students' self-reported high school grade point average (HSGPA) from the SAT Questionnaire and their HSGPA provided by the colleges and universities they attend. The purpose of this research was to offer updated information on the relatedness of…

A number of scholars have questioned the practice of assessing academic writing in the context of a one-off language test, claiming that the time restrictions imposed in the test environment, when compared to the writing conditions typical at university, may prevent learners from displaying the kinds of writing skills required in academic…

The main purpose of this research is 1) to establish a framework for the test development and the constructs of writing performance test, 2) to implement a developed writing performance assessment, and 3) to examine the degree of reliability and validity of the assessment tasks and rating scales. Construct-based processing approach to testing…

The aim of this study is to explore the possible relationships between the readiness and reading and writing performances of a group of children who are first graders in an elementary school in Turkey. The states of children in terms of school readiness, sound-letter relationships, and phonemic awareness were determined individually during the…

Testing the hypotheses that reflective timed-essay prompts should elicit memories of meaningful experiences in students' undergraduate education, and that computer-mediated classroom experiences should be salient among those memories, a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods paints a richer, more complex picture than either…

Large-scale writing programs can add value to the traditional timed writing assessment by using aspects of the essays to assess the effectiveness of institutional goals, programs, and curriculums. The "six learning goals" prompt in this study represents an attempt to provide an accurate writing assessment that moves beyond scores. This…

This article presents the features, and a brief comparison, of some of the most well-known high-stakes exams. They are classified in the following fashion: tests that only include multiple-choice questions, tests that include writing and multiple-choice questions, and tests that include speaking questions. The tests reviewed are: BULATS, IELTS,…

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better…

This article examines the influence of keyboarding versus handwriting in a high-stakes writing assessment. Conclusions are based on data collected from a pilot project to move Old Dominion University's Exit Exam of Writing Proficiency from a handwritten format into a dual-option format (i.e., the students may choose to handwrite or keyboard the…

We examined the technical adequacy of writing progress measures as indicators of success on state standards tests. Tenth-grade students wrote for 10 min, marking their samples at 3, 5, and 7 min. Samples were scored for words written, words spelled correctly, and correct and correct minus incorrect word sequences. The number of correct minus…

Despite the debate among writing researchers about its viability as a pedagogical tool in writing instruction [e.g., Helms-Park, R., & Stapleton, P. (2003). "Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with pedagogical implications." "Journal of Second Language Writing," 12 (3),…