Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students' development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, "Reflection";…

In this article, we compare holistic, analytic and cross-linguistic measures of assessment in writing considering the whole linguistic repertoire of multilingual writers. We explore different ways to look at their three languages by focusing on the relationships between these languages rather than looking at each language in isolation. We analyse…

How an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as 'authors' is important,…

This study used wrap-up effects on eye movements to assess the relationship between online reading behavior and comprehension. Participants, assessed on measures of reading, vocabulary, and spelling, read short passages that manipulated whether a syntactic boundary was "unmarked" by punctuation, "weakly marked" by a comma, or…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influences of calendar year, year level, gender and language background other than English (LBOTE) on student achievement in literacy and numeracy relative to class size. Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were collected over five years (2008-2012) as test results from the…

In this study, the purpose was to determine whether there was concordance among raters in the assessment of the writing performance using analytic rubric; furthermore, factors affecting the assessment process were examined. The analytic rubric used in the study consists of three sections and ten properties: External structure (format, spelling and…

An item discriminability study of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills Language Skills tests identified test items that are robust discriminators, psychometrically capable of separating low scorers from higher scorers in the language tests battery. The analysis was conducted by calculating a point-biserial correlation for each item on the four language…