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…

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) recognizes campuses around the world as fundamentally multilingual spaces, in which students and faculty bring to the acts of writing and communication a rich array of linguistic and cultural resources that enrich academic life and should be valued and supported. The aim of this…

This handbook describes the responsibilities of district and school assessment coordinators in the administration of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA). This updated guidebook contains the following sections: (1) General Assessment Guidelines for All Assessments; (2) Writing Specific Guidelines; (3) Reading and Mathematics…

Teaching English became a professional and academic field from a half century ago. Many researches for teacher education and teacher training have been conducted in order to raise the English as well as the foreign language trainers' knowledge and capabilities in carrying out effective lessons in classroom. During second millennium of speedily…

The complex and comprehensive nature of writing-across-the-curriculum programs makes them difficult to evaluate. There are some measures of program effectiveness that are easy to collect and others that are worth trying for. (MSE)

Offers guidelines and illustrations for developmental writing teachers to help them implement holistic assessment of student writing. Presents a rationale for separating assessment and placement. Discusses the design of writing tasks and the training of raters. Includes a sample scoring rubric. (DMM)

Developed to assist teachers in Ottawa County, Ohio, in monitoring students' pupil performance objectives (PPOs) in grades K-3, this writing evaluation form is the primary record keeping tool in the Competency Based Education (CBE) Program. The form consists of: (1) the evaluation checklist; (2) the intervention code; and (3) record keeping…

Holistic scoring of essays, a writing assessment method in which trained raters make a single overall judgement of the quality of a piece of writing, has acceptable reliability, face validity, and speed of administration. (Author/CL)

This book describes a procedure for scoring writing samples with holistic methods and for analyzing the results with methods from primary trait scoring, analytical scoring, and discourse scoring. Following an introduction, the four chapters in the book focus on (1) the selection of topics to be used in a writing assessment, (2) the format for…

Describes a large-scale model of portfolio assessment that used papers collected from 27 fifth grade students throughout a school district in Durham, New Hampshire. Highlights information that can be gleaned from this approach to assessment, and notes that instruction should be adapted to respond to the results of the assessment. (MM)

The result of a workshop on the holistic scoring of compositions, this guide is intended to help elementary school teachers evaluate more thoroughly their students' writing. Following an introduction to the handbook's origins, the first section discusses elements of holistic scoring, including procedures for preparation, scoring, and interpreting…

This paper was prepared for school officials and researchers who plan to conduct an assessment of student writing but have limited field experience with this activity. The paper identifies twelve critical questions assessors should consider, and it explores issues involved in reaching a decision about each from the perspectives of measurement…

Describes a collaborative-writing assessment system that rewards each student both for the group's performance and for individual participation. Presents a survey of student attitudes toward an assignment incorporating the assessment system, and reveals that students perceived the assessment as fair and effective. (MM)

Argues that the evaluation of writing instruction requires special procedures and specially designed instruments. Provides instruments for evaluating a writing program's foundations, for developing teachers' awareness of the features of their writing classroom, and preparing questions and guidelines for evaluating writing assignments and teacher…

This 1982 supplement is a further elaboration to the Writing Assessment which was distributed in 1981 to assist schools in assessment of writing by detailing scoring procedures, standard-setting, and the reporting of results. The supplement deals with retesting, alternative methods for setting standards, establishing score equivalency on writing…