After investigating characteristics of students' writing that contributed to their passing or failing a university writing competence examination, researchers designed and implemented instruction to help college-bound 11th graders develop appropriate writing skills. Analysis of students' pre- and postintervention writing indicated that the…

This study investigated how domain specifications controlled topic and rater reliability. History students completed three performance tasks. For each topic, they took prior knowledge tests, read primary materials, and wrote explanatory essays. Using a theory-based scoring rubric, four raters scored all essays. The rubric worked similarly on the…

This research applied evolving conceptions of learning to examine how to represent and evaluate students' and experts' cognitive structures. High school history students completed several tasks. Direct comparisons of the quality of student maps with expert maps showed that experts' concept maps could be used to score students' concept maps…