Developed by the National Writing Project (NWP), the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) seeks to improve students' argument writing by building teachers' understanding of and skill in teaching source-based argument writing. The program features intensive professional development, skill-based instructional resources, and…

Undergraduate writing fellows play an important role in administering writing assignments in writing-intensive courses. At the University of Michigan, the MWrite program was designed to support the implementation of writing-to-learn (WTL) assignments in STEM courses. Within MWrite, writing fellows are a primary instructional resource for students…

This study provides significant advances in the understanding and utility of writing assessment for progress monitoring writing instruction. We explored the validity of a new writing tool that asks students in Grades 3 through 8 to read and respond to informational passages. The written response is then scored for writing fluency. Results…

Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of…

Published scholarship in writing assessment has expressed a growing consensus around the value of locally-controlled assessment practices, as well as the relationship between writing assessment and social justice. At the same time, this scholarship has little representation of student perspective. This project responds to these disciplinary…

Scholars such as Diane Kelly-Riley and Patricia Bizzell have argued that the student writing feature most likely to place a student into a basic writing course is the presence of dialect other than standard academic English. This essay examines how assessment practices can foster students' diverse languages rather than inhibit them. I conducted a…

We present some key findings of a four-year, two-phase writing assessment project at Central Michigan University: Phase One (2002), a survey of faculty members (n=115) and subsequent focus groups (n=14) and Phase Two (2005), an evaluation of two samples of student writing (n=635 and 632). Major findings of Phase One reported here include the…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether asking third grade students in one school district in the Metro Detroit area to draw a picture of a narrative story idea before writing about it would improve the points earned on the Michigan standardized writing assessment (MEAP test). One half, or four out of eight, of the…

Automated scoring has the potential to dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with the assessment of complex skills such as writing, but its use must be validated against a variety of criteria for it to be accepted by test users and stakeholders. This study addresses two validity-related issues regarding the use of e-rater® with the…

History departments are not generally known as hotbeds of assessment activity. Doctoral programs in history rarely touch the issue of how to assess student learning, while program review as an idea appears to many historians as an invasion of their turf by outsiders. At Eastern Michigan University, members of the faculty in the Department of…