As your school district undertakes the process of evaluating its K-12 reading program, literacy curriculum, or literacy instructional practices, this book will be your go-to resource. Pennell offers a step-by-step guide for educators, school leaders, or professional learning communities to evaluate high-quality instructional materials and…

Writing and the teaching of writing is changing at a rapid pace. How can educators understand writing assessment "as" and "with" technology in the 21st-century classroom? Michael Neal contends that new technologies are neither the problem nor the solution. Instead, educators need to tap into digital resources only inasmuch as they promote writing…

To address the need for information on techniques and theory on the evaluation of composition instruction, this book has been revised to incorporate the most recent thinking on the topic. It begins with suggestions for how readers of different backgrounds can make best use of the book, followed by an introduction. The first chapter deals with…

Addressing the need to develop an evaluation system that assesses the effectiveness of a writing program on students' performance, the Holistic Writing Assessment Program of Mosley High School (Florida) was devised to ascertain and document the extent to which improvement occurred in students' compositions. On a designated day in the semester, all…

Based on a writing program evaluation project that took place in the Ferguson-Florissant School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, this booklet provides administrators and policymakers with a plan for evaluating their own writing programs and also provides results of the Ferguson-Florissant evaluation. The first chapter contains…

Intended primarily for Kentucky classroom teachers and administrators, this idea book first identifies three major issues that members of the Writing Advisory Committee felt should be addressed so that writing instruction will not suffer because of use of the writing portfolio. The broad issues emphasized in the idea book are for teachers to: (1)…

As part of the American school reform movement, administrators are searching for ways of measuring students' skills and progress within the system. This book focuses on the qualitative assessment possible through the use of student portfolios, particularly at the college level. It begins with a critical examination of multiple-choice, standardized…

Samples of student writing from the Alberta (Canada) 9th grade achievement test in writing (administered in June 1990) are presented with evaluative commentaries. They are intended to offer teachers, administrators, and students illustration of the criteria and approach used to score the exam. The exam is one part of a two-part standardized test…

Rather than being trained and supervised, graduate teaching assistants in rhetoric and speech should be taught and advised. Teaching assistants, or graduate instructors, should be considered colleagues, not merely cheap labor to teach courses the rest of the faculty does not want to teach. The first step in establishing an effective teaching and…

The result of an investigation into the grading writing by the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Alternatives to Grading Student Writing, this collection of essays offers the writing teacher several innovative and interesting options. Following an introduction by the editor (chair of the Committee), in which he delineates the…

The samples of students' writing found in this document exemplify the criteria used to score students' written responses on the June 1994 Grade 9 English Language Arts Achievement Test. Representative of the full range of students' writing, the examples in the document are intended to be used as tools to assist teachers, students, and…

The purpose of this document is to provide administrators, teachers, and students with samples of students' writing that exemplify the criteria used to score students' written responses on the June 1993 Grade 3 Language Learning Achievement Test and the written component of the performance assessment administered to a provincial sample of grade 3…

Examines science textbook language and determines some characteristics of them: distant authorial voice, concern for precision, limited context, limited syntax, and rhetorical model. Suggests three further researcher needs. (YP)

This collection of student essays provides illustrations of the criteria used to grade the composition portion of the sixth-grade achievement test used in Alberta (Canada). An introductory section describes the procedures for selecting the essays used, establishing scoring norms, and scoring the tests, and offers general comments on the writing…

Developing substantial links between colleges and elementary, middle, and secondary schools to create a sensible, longitudinal process for developing writing skills can be mutually beneficial. Contacts with schools are easy to make. College composition teachers can contact high school teachers to bring their "college prep" classes for an…