In response to widespread concern that many American students do not write well enough to meet the requirements of higher education and the workplace, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges has called for a writing revolution. A key component of this revolution is evaluation, with particular emphasis…

Objective: To compare simulator-based teaching with traditional instruction among clinical medical students. Methods: Randomized controlled trial with written pre-post testing. Third-year medical students (n = 38) received either a myocardial infarction (MI) simulation followed by a reactive airways disease (RAD) lecture, or a RAD simulation…

The goal of the current study was to examine the validity and topic generality of a writing performance test designed to place international students into appropriate ESL courses at a large mid-western university. Because for each test administration the test randomly rotates three academic topics integrated with listening and reading sources, it…

In 1999, things were dismal at Lebanon, Pennsylvania's Harding Elementary School. Many kids in this former coal town started at a disadvantage and never seemed to catch up. They were bored with books about "frogs on logs," says then-new principal Cheryl Champion. Since they were not engaged, they acted out. Harding's classroom…

The present study investigated the effectiveness of integrating RCampus in EFL freshman classrooms on EFL students' reading and writing skills development. Forty-three freshman students majoring in translation participated in the study. Before instruction, the students were pretested. Then they received traditional in-class instruction that…

This study presents an investigation of information literacy as defined by the ETS iSkills™ assessment and by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) Information Literacy Scale (ILS). As two related but distinct measures, both iSkills and the ILS were used with undergraduate students at NJIT during the spring 2006 semester. Undergraduate…

This handbook is intended to help high school and college counselors effectively use and interpret ACT results. It contains four main sections: Section 1, "Components of the ACT," which contains general information about the ACT tests, probably will be of interest both to high school counselors and to college advisors and other staff. …

This action research study evaluates a classroom approach incorporating a reflective, metacognitive component within a second language process-oriented writing environment. Inspired by the literature and developed by the first author, this approach seeks to provide English language learners (ELLs) with a command of metalinguistic principles…

This study examined whether the graphemic structure of words modulates the timing of handwriting production during the acquisition of writing skills. This is particularly important during the acquisition period because phonological recoding skills are determinant in the elaboration of orthographic representations. First graders wrote seven-letter…

This study examined the relationship between high school student achievement, per pupil expenditure, school district enrollment, selected student demographics (economically disadvantaged, racial and ethnic groupings {African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Native American/Alaskan, and White}, limited English proficiency, and students…

Our nation's bleak economic situation has forced state governments to cut educational funding. While funds are decreasing, accountability for student achievement remains high. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) forces each state to create and implement an accountability system of rewards and sanctions based on standardized test scores. In…

The present study investigates the use of English lexical collocations and their relation to the online writing of Taiwanese college English majors and non-English majors. Data for the study were collected from 41 English majors and 21 non-English majors at a national university of science and technology in southern Taiwan. Each student was asked…

This study investigated whether dedicated test preparation classes gave learners an advantage in improving their writing test scores. Score gains following instruction on a measure of academic writing skills--the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) academic writing test--were compared across language courses of three types; all…

Educators often have to choose among different types of rating scales to assess second-language (L2) writing performance. There is little research, however, on how different rating scales affect rater performance. This study employed a mixed-method approach to investigate the effects of two different rating scales on EFL essay scores, rating…

The objective of the present investigation was to examine the comparability of writing prompts for different gender groups in the context of the computer-based Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]-CBT). A total of 87 prompts administered from July 1998 through March 2000 were analyzed. An extended version of logistic regression for…