To help teachers, administrators, and parents understand student performance in writing, a state-level report is prepared each year to analyze students writing scores and provide guidelines for the interpretation of the results. This report compares students scores on the 2001 Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) with scores on the 2000 DSTP using the new scoring rules for writing. In 2001, Delaware students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 10 took the DSTP writing assessment. Each student responded to a text-based writing task and a stand-alone writing prompt. Each students response to the text-based task was scored by one trained reader using a five-point scoring rubric, and responses to the stand-alone writing were scored by two raters. This report contains the newly calculated means and standard deviations for the writing scores from 1998 through 2000. The generalizability of writing scores is low across the discourses of writing tasks, writing topics, and occasions, but a summary is presented for reference uses. The results of the writing assessments suggest that writing performance remained similar to the previous year in grades 3 and 10, but improved slightly for grades 5 and 8. For the stand-alone task, there was no difference from the previous year for grades 3 and 10, but slightly higher scores for grades 5 and 8. A similar pattern was seen for the text-based writing task. A cross-grade pattern shows that the frequency distributions of writing scores shifted gradually from the lower-score end to the higher-score end, so that more students received a higher score, and fewer a lower score, in 2001 than in 2000. An attachment contains supplemental information about test results. (SLD)