During the summer of 1990, a university English education professor in Indiana responded to the writing of 20 fourth through seventh graders via a computer installed in his home. The students wrote daily anything ranging from a 3-line haiku to 10-20 computer-screen stories. The classroom teacher took the students through the steps in the writing…

Noting that Oregon has been a pioneer in developing assessments which require actual student writing, this booklet includes a collection of student essays and shows how they were evaluated by teachers. The sample essays in the booklet are useful in staff development activities and may also be shared with students, serving as models to help…

Noting that Oregon has been a pioneer in developing assessments which require actual student writing, this booklet includes a collection of student essays and shows how they were evaluated by teachers. The sample essays in the booklet are useful in staff development activities and may also be shared with students, serving as models to help…

Although Mina Shaughnessy remains influential in the basic writing field, her answers to the vital questions of who basic writers are and why they underachieve as writers are changing. Whether she intended to or not, Shaughnessy's book "Errors and Expectations" (published in 1977) was a major force in forming an image of basic writers as…

Providing information to help develop students' sense of narrative and to show them specific test-taking strategies, this publication is helpful to teachers as they ready their students for the North Carolina Fourth Grade Writing Assessment. The publication provides materials on generating ideas for writing, selecting topics, revising, developing…

In response to a state-wide request in 1986-87 from the governor of Missouri, public institutions of higher education undertook assessment projects related to their students' basic skills. English faculty at Missouri Western State College conducted a composition assessment project in which they used timed holistically scored writing as a means of…

The Des Moines Plan (DMP) is described, which is a comprehensive kindergarten through grade 12 program designed to improve and strengthen students' reading, writing, and mathematics skills. The program was implemented during the fall semester of the 1986-87 school year. The DMP adopted the instructional model implemented by the Chapter 1 program…

Education is the building block of every student's future. To ensure all students have every opportunity to succeed, Indiana adopted world-class academic standards in English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies and an assessment system to measure student progress. These standards clearly outline what students should know and be…

This paper reports the early stages of a 3-year evaluation of the Early Intervention Programme in Scotland. The Early Intervention Programme is a high-profile government initiative which receives major government funding (60 million pounds sterling over 5 years) and is designed to improve standards of literacy and numeracy in the first 2 years of…

Each of the 161 National Writing Project sites offers an intensive institute every summer and invites distinguished local teachers of writing from all grade levels, from kindergarten through university, to attend. The institute focuses on these teachers, examining their exemplary classroom practices, supporting their work with research studies,…

This action research project describes a program to increase the basic writing ability and improve the attitude of sixth grade students. The targeted classroom was located in a unit district 45 miles northwest of a large metropolitan area. The district's population consists of a large amount of minority students and low-income families. Evidence…

This annotated bibliography is intended to help teachers of composition improve writing quality of entering college students. The main body of the report is preceded by a brief summary of sources for faculty interested in examining the causes attributed to the decline in college students' writing skills, including: "National Assessment and the…

This demonstration booklet illustrates the kinds of exercises or test questions and tasks used in the assessment of student achievement in reading and in writing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Each student will be asked to complete the background section and the cognitive sections in one subject, and the assessment will…

This demonstration booklet illustrates the kinds of exercises or test questions and tasks used in the assessment of student achievement in reading and writing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Each student will be asked to complete the background section and the cognitive sections for one subject, and the assessment will…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1998 Writing Assessment measured student writing performance at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. Scoring guides for three different writing purposes for each grade allowed scorers to objectively evaluate students' work. This issue of NAEPfacts includes an 8th-grade informative writing scoring…