Pedagogical shifts that incorporate multimodal and digital literacies challenge the world in which literacy teachers have lived and worked. Effective professional development (PD) experiences may increase teachers' knowledge and enlarge their teaching paradigms about writing instruction. The current study explored ways PD might encourage teachers…

A prompt can be used as a medium to help students write a descriptive text. There is a lack of research on the type of prompts which can help students formulate and organize their ideas. Therefore, this study aims to determine whether there was a significant difference in the score of idea formulation and organization in a descriptive text between…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether struggling adolescent writers could learn sentence and paragraph writing skills from a software program. Nine junior-high and nine senior-high struggling writers participated in a multiple-probe across-students design that was replicated six times. Instructional procedures within the software…

Scenario-based writing assessment has two salient characteristics by design: a lead-in/essay scaffolding structure and a unified scenario/topic throughout. In this study, we examine whether the scenario-based assessment design would impact students' essay scores compared to its alternative conditions, which intentionally broke the scaffolding…

In many schools in America, reading and writing are taught as separate entities within the course of an academic day (Grabe & Zhang, 2013; Parodi, 2007). Instead, research indicates that "Teachers should exploit the potentiality of teaching and practicing reading and writing together, starting from local cohesion resources to different…

In this study, I investigate whether three A2 Key for Schools practice tests from Cambridge Assessment English for 6th-graders (11-12 years old) in Argentina measure growth and produce scores that are meaningful. Drawing data from three consecutive years, I analyze the scores of 80 children over a school year and consider whether the tests are…

During the academic year in the state of Georgia, EL students in public schools take the Georgia Milestones End-of-Grade and the ACCESS 2.0 assessments, which are in line with the state-mandated subject area standards in mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies, as well as English language proficiency standards (Georgia Department…

This empirical study examines the sustainability and generalisability of the impact of the storytelling strategy, which was implemented earlier with grade 7 students. The sample of this study involved 30 students which are randomly chosen and four teachers, who participated in the experimental groups. The researcher used the mixed approach for…

Background/Context: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are used for policy and program evaluation where subjects' eligibility into a program or policy is determined by whether an assignment variable (i.e., running variable) exceeds a pre-defined cutoff. Under a standard RD design with a continuous assignment variable, the average treatment…

Notwithstanding the introduction of education multilingual policies worldwide, testing and assessment procedures still rely almost exclusively on the monolingual construct. This paper describes a study, part of a larger project fostering a new multilingual education policy in Israeli schools, exploring bi/multilingual assessment. It included two…

This report summarizes an empirical study that addresses two related topics within the context of writing assessment--illusory halo and how much unique information is provided by multiple analytic scores. Specifically, we address the issue of whether unique information is provided by analytic scores assigned to student writing, beyond what is…

These maps are representing State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) passing rates for each AISD campus, for grades 3 through 12 in school year 2012-2013.

The effect of using a computer or paper and pencil on student writing scores on a provincial standardized writing assessment was studied. A sample of 302 francophone students wrote a short essay using a computer equipped with Microsoft Word with all of its correction functions enabled. One week later, the same students wrote a second short essay…

This study examined the relationship between ninth-grade students' use of connectives (temporal, causal, adversative, and additive) in functional writing and performance on standards-based/criterion-referenced measures of reading and writing. Specifically, structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were used to examine the relationship between…

In an "ex post facto" causal-comparative research design, this study investigated the effectiveness of a formative writing assessment program, Write Score, on increasing student writing achievement. Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) reading language arts and writing scores from 2012 were utilized for this study. The…