A study investigated what can be learned about the strengths and weaknesses of students' writing from direct assessment of writing performance and knowledge of overall student performance. In the first part of the study, all 13 school districts in Alaska participated in an interdistrict writing assessment procedure intended to measure the overall…

The writing performance standard descriptors in this paper support the sections of the English/Language Arts Content Standards adopted by the Alaska State Board of Education. It begins with listing competencies associated with speaking and writing well for a variety of purposes and audiences; and thinking logically and reflectively. It then…

In this column, the author relates her experience as a teacher in a K-12 school in Point Hope, Alaska, where most of the students spoke "village English," a form of nonstandard English mixed with the village's native language of Inupiaq. She relates how the students' reading test scores, which had been below the 25th percentile, were…