Background: Marking of essays is mainly carried out by human raters who bring in their own subjective and idiosyncratic evaluation criteria, which sometimes lead to discrepancy. This discrepancy may in turn raise issues like reliability and fairness. The current research attempts to explore the evaluation criteria of markers on a national level…

This classroom-based qualitative study sought to investigate students' writing in response to culturally relevant literature. Eleven students enrolled in two grade twelve, special education classrooms in a large, urban high school participated in the study. The students included Dive female, six male, three Hispanic and eight African American; all…

This study explores correlations between human ratings of essay quality and component scores based on similar natural language processing indices and weighted through a principal component analysis. The results demonstrate that such component scores show small to large effects with human ratings and thus may be suitable to providing both summative…

A developmental writing scale for timed essay-writing performance was created on the basis of automatically computed indicators of writing fluency, word choice, and conventions of standard written English. In a large-scale data collection effort that involved a national sample of more than 12,000 students from 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grade,…

Inside this issue are: (1) Questions Tool; (2) NAEP Support; (3) NAEP Writing Assessment; (4) Grade 12 Results; (5) Background Questions: (6) NAEP Scale Scores and Achievement Levels; and (7) Grade 8 Math Comparisons by Ethnic Group. This publication notes several points of interest. 170,000 students at each grade and subject will be selected to…

A study examined whether Canadian twelfth grade students' papers would rate differently when they were written in different modes and whether there are significant differences between global (modified holistic) scores and rhetorical effectiveness (modified primary trait) scores for the same papers. Fifty students wrote on two transactional topics…

This bulletin is intended to provide a brief summary of the California Assessment Program (CAP) testing results for the 1986-87 school year. General comments regarding testing in San Diego (California), commonly asked questions, and school- and district-level results are provided. Tabulated results cover mean scale scores for grades 3, 6, and 8…

In this non-experimental study, a model was developed for portfolio assessment based on definitions and applications in the assessment literature. This model describes portfolio components, scores to be computed, and uses to be made of the scores. The literature was then reviewed to find examples of actual applications that would provide realistic…