Download or read book Designing Writing Assignments written by Traci Gardner and published by National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte). This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Effective student writing begins with well-designed classroom assignments. In Designing Writing Assignments, veteran educator Traci Gardner offers practical ways for teachers to develop assignments that will allow students to express their creativity and grow as writers and thinkers while still addressing the many demands of resource-stretched classrooms.

Download or read book Designing Writing Tasks for the Assessment of Writing written by Leo Ruth and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1988 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reports the results of a series of investigations of the properties of writing tasks, their authors' intentions, and the responses that these tasks evoked in student-writers and teacher-raters. The volume explains how both student-writers and teacher-raters, in their reading of the same topic/text, can arrive at different meanings. The investigations undertaken led the authors to make a number of recommendations about selecting subjects, specifying audience and mode, formulating instructions, and wording the topic. These recommendations are presented in non-technical language in a comprehensive set of Guidelines for Designing Topics for Writing Assessments.

Download or read book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies written by Asao B. Inoue and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-11-08 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is “more than” its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts.

Download or read book Teaching Academic Writing written by Caroline Coffin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-26 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher education lecturers and tutors teach writing to their students. Containing a range of diverse teaching strategies, the book offers both practical activities to help students develop their writing abilities and guidelines to help lecturers and tutors think in more depth about the assessment tasks they set and the feedback they give to students. The authors explore a wide variety of text types, from essays and reflective diaries to research projects and laboratory reports. The book draws on recent research in the fields of academic literacy, second language learning, and linguistics. It is grounded in recent developments such as the increasing diversity of the student body, the use of the Internet, electronic tuition, and issues related to distance learning in an era of increasing globalisation. Written by experienced teachers of writing, language, and linguistics, Teaching Academic Writing will be of interest to anyone involved in teaching academic writing in higher education.

Download or read book Assessing Writing written by Billie F. Birnie and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book on assessing writing is designed for teachers, school leaders, and evaluators. It begins with a collection of assessment practices that will increase teachers' efficiency and effectiveness as they guide students in learning how to think and write successfully. The second section includes step-by-step procedures, prompts, and rubrics for conducting on-demand, timed writing assessments, either for diagnosis of students' skills or for analysis of instruction. The final section explains how to develop and measure interrater reliability, the extent to which assessors agree on the quality of student writing-a critical component for any faculty that seeks to increase the efficacy of their teaching. Whether readers wish to assess the thinking and writing of students in one class, one school, or a whole district, this book will show them how.

Download or read book Understanding by Design written by Grant P. Wiggins and published by ASCD. This book was released on 2005 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Download or read book Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions written by Xiaoming Xi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is a state-of-the-art overview of advances in theories and practices relevant to the assessment of academic English skills for higher education admissions purposes. The volume includes a brief introduction followed by four main chapters focusing on critical developments in theories and practices for assessing reading, listening, writing, and speaking, of which the latter two also address the assessment of integrated skills such as reading-writing, listening-speaking, and reading-listening-speaking. Each chapter reviews new task types, scoring approaches, and scoring technologies and their implications in light of the increasing use of technology in academic communication and the growing use of English as a lingua franca worldwide. The volume concludes with recommendations about critical areas of research and development that will help move the field forward. Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students in language testing and assessment worldwide.

Download or read book Assessing Writing Assessing Learning written by Dudley W. Reynolds and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-06-07 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goals of this resource are broader than many standard books on writing assessment, which focus on evaluating an individual’s ability to create an effective piece of writing for a particular purpose. Assessing Writing, Assessing Learning seeks to support teachers, administrators, program directors, and funding entities who want to make the best use of the resources at their disposal to understand what students are learning and why and then take actions based on what they have learned. It also seeks to provide a common basis for communication among all the interested parties—the writing professionals, the people who identified the need for the program, and the students. The book has sections on planning, tools (different ways of collecting data and links to instruments), and reporting (examples provided). Each section includes a discussion of issues and advice for working through the issue along with numerous examples, plus a list of resources to consult to learn more. The final chapter provides worksheets that may be reproduced and used to help those in charge of setting up and delivering a writing program to think through the issues presented. A glossary of terms is also included.

Download or read book A Program Development Handbook for the Holistic Assessment of Writing written by Norbert Elliot and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1990 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a major breakthrough for developers of writing assessment programs who must certify the writing competency of undergraduate students. Legislators and accreditation boards across the nation have called for and implemented large scale projects to measure educational outcomes. This single source provides comprehensive information on the history, underlying concepts, and process of conducting a large scale writing assessment program at a specific institution of higher education. The handbook opens with an analysis of the rationale for the assessment of writing during the junior year of the undergraduate curriculum. The authors then turn to a case study of the success of their own institutional wide assessment program. A history is provided of 20th century writing assessment practices; as well, attention is given to defining levels of literacy. After describing an assessment process model, discussion turns to the design of questions, the administration of the assessment, the rating of papers, and the statistical analysis of data. Attention is also given to the design of a course for those who are unsuccessful on the assessment. The study closes with directions for further research and over 200 references in the bibliography.

Download or read book Assessing Writing to Support Learning written by Sandra Murphy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, authors Murphy and O’Neill propose a new way forward, moving away from high-stakes, test-based writing assessment and the curriculum it generates and toward an approach to assessment that centers on student learning and success. Reviewing the landscape of writing assessment and existing research-based theories on writing, the authors demonstrate how a test-based approach to accountability and current practices have undermined effective teaching and learning of writing. This book bridges the gap between real-world writing that takes place in schools, college, and careers and the writing that students are asked to do in standardized writing assessments to offer a new ecological approach to writing assessment. Murphy and O’Neill’s new way forward turns accountability inside out to help teachers understand the role of formative assessments and assessment as inquiry. It also brings the outside in, by bridging the gap between authentic writing and writing assessment. Through these two strands, readers learn how assessment systems can be restructured to become better aligned with contemporary understandings of writing and with best practices in teaching. With examples of assessments from elementary school through college, chapters include guidance on designing assessments to address multiple kinds of writing, integrate reading with writing, and incorporate digital technology and multimodality. Emphasizing the central role that teachers play in systemic reform, the authors offer sample assessments developed with intensive teacher involvement that support learning and provide information for the evaluation of programs and schools. This book is an essential resource for graduate students, instructors, scholars and policymakers in writing assessment, composition, and English education.

Download or read book INVESTIGATING COMPARABILITY OF WRITING TASKS WITH PICTURE PROMPTS IN AN IN HOUSE ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TEST written by YALI SHI and published by American Academic Press. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For security reasons, using parallel writing tasks within or across different test administrations is common practice in large-scale language testing. Lack of task comparability would result in unjustified variance in test performance and consequently jeopardize test validity and fairness. Thus, it is crucial for test developers to gather empirical evidence from different aspects to substantiate the fairness argument that scores are consistent and score-based decisions are impartial across parallel tasks. Despite many studies hitherto on writing task comparability, those addressing picture-prompt writing tasks in an integrated manner have remained quite underexplored. Therefore, this book investigates the comparability of five writing tasks with picture prompts randomly assigned across testing occasions in an in-house English proficiency test (EPT) of a comprehensive university from three perspectives—the scores, the texts, and the raters and test takers. Results show that task difficulty is not comparable either in terms of some lexical, syntactic and content features elicited or as judged by raters and test takers, which could be related with topic familiarity and conceptual clarity of the picture prompt. Yet, overall task comparability is achieved in not only final scores but also score distribution and classification accuracy. The findings support the fairness argument for EPT writing and provide theoretical, practical and methodological implications.

Download or read book How Learning Works written by Susan A. Ambrose and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for How Learning Works "How Learning Works is the perfect title for this excellent book. Drawing upon new research in psychology, education, and cognitive science, the authors have demystified a complex topic into clear explanations of seven powerful learning principles. Full of great ideas and practical suggestions, all based on solid research evidence, this book is essential reading for instructors at all levels who wish to improve their students' learning." —Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice chancellor for educational development, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Tools for Teaching "This book is a must-read for every instructor, new or experienced. Although I have been teaching for almost thirty years, as I read this book I found myself resonating with many of its ideas, and I discovered new ways of thinking about teaching." —Eugenia T. Paulus, professor of chemistry, North Hennepin Community College, and 2008 U.S. Community Colleges Professor of the Year from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education "Thank you Carnegie Mellon for making accessible what has previously been inaccessible to those of us who are not learning scientists. Your focus on the essence of learning combined with concrete examples of the daily challenges of teaching and clear tactical strategies for faculty to consider is a welcome work. I will recommend this book to all my colleagues." —Catherine M. Casserly, senior partner, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "As you read about each of the seven basic learning principles in this book, you will find advice that is grounded in learning theory, based on research evidence, relevant to college teaching, and easy to understand. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in applying the science of learning to college teaching, and they graciously share it with you in this organized and readable book." —From the Foreword by Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; and author, Multimedia Learning

Download or read book Conceptualizing Designing Implementing and Evaluating Writing Interventions written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a fresh look at the challenge of setting up educational writing intervention studies in authentic class contexts. In four sections, the book offers innovative approaches on how to conceptualize, design, implement, and evaluate writing interventions for research purposes. Hot topics in the field such as professional development for scaling up writing interventions, building research practice partnerships, implementation variation and fidelity, and response to intervention are addressed. To illustrate the proposed approaches for writing promotion, the book showcases a wide variety of writing interventions from around the world, ranging from single-participant designs to large-scale intervention studies in writing.

Download or read book Assessment Clear and Simple written by Barbara E. Walvoord and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of Assessment Clear and Simple quickly became the essential go-to guide for anyone who participates in the assessment process in higher education. With the increased pressure to perform assessment to demonstrate accountability, Assessment Clear and Simple is needed more than ever. This second edition of the classic resource offers a concise, step-by-step guide that helps make assessment simple, cost-efficient, and useful to an institution. It contains effective strategies for meeting the requirements of accreditation agencies, legislatures, review boards, and others, while emphasizing and showing how to move from data to actions that improve student learning. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes many new or expanded features, including: Illustrative examples drawn from the author's experience consulting with more than 350 institutions A basic, no-frills assessment plan for departments and for general education Tips on how to integrate portfolios and e-portfolios into the assessment process Suggestions for using rubrics and alternatives to rubrics, including doing assessment for multidisciplinary work Clear instructions on how to construct a coherent institution-wide assessment system and explain it to accreditors Ideas for assigning responsibility for general education assessment Strategies for gathering information about departmental assessment while keeping the departmental workload manageable Information on how to manage assessment in times of budgetary cutbacks Praise for the Second Edition of Assessment Clear and Simple "Walvoord's approach to assessment is wonderfully straightforward; it is also effective in facilitating faculty engagement in assessment. We've applied a number of her methods to our campus assessment efforts with success. This book makes assessment both manageable and useful in improving and enhancing student learning." Martha L. A. Stassen, director of assessment, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and president, New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN) "Walvoord's work clearly presents the basics for getting started in assessment of student learning while honestly addressing the complexities of assessment when driven by faculty passion for student learning. This book is a valuable resource for the novice as well as the developing experts who are leading their institutions in academic assessment." Bobbi Allen, faculty assessment director, Delta College

Download or read book On a Scale written by Norbert Elliot and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fear and Trembling? Shock and Awe? Which set of statements best describes the emotions surrounding the assessment of writing ability in educational settings? This book - the first historical study of its kind - begins with Harvard University's 1874 requirement that first-year student applicants submit a short composition as part of the admissions process; the book concludes with the College Board's 2005 requirement for an essay to be submitted as part of the new SAT(R) Reasoning Test. Intended for teachers who must prepare students to submit their writing for formal assessment, administrators who must make critical decisions based on test scores, and policy makers who must allocate resources based on evaluation systems, On a Scale provides a much-needed historical and conceptual background to questions arising from national attention to student writing ability.

Download or read book Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing written by IRA/NCTE Joint Task Force on Assessment and published by International Reading Assoc.. This book was released on 2009-12-03 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this updated document, IRA and NCTE reaffirm their position that the primary purpose of assessment must be to improve teaching and learning for all students. Eleven core standards are presented and explained, and a helpful glossary makes this document suitable not only for educators but for parents, policymakers, school board members, and other stakeholders. Case studies of large-scale national tests and smaller scale classroom assessments (particularly in the context of RTI, or Response to Intervention) are used to highlight how assessments in use today do or do not meet the standards.

Download or read book Writing Assessment and Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities written by Nancy Mather and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-12 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hands-on guide for anyone who teaches writing to students with learning disabilities This valuable resource helps teachers who want to sharpen their skills in analyzing and teaching writing to students with learning disabilities. The classroom-tested, research-proven strategies offered in this book work with all struggling students who have difficulties with writing-even those who have not been classified as learning disabled. The book offers a review of basic skills-spelling, punctuation, and capitalization-and includes instructional strategies to help children who struggle with these basics. The authors provide numerous approaches for enhancing student performance in written expression. They explore the most common reasons students are reluctant to write and offer helpful suggestions for motivating them. Includes a much-needed guide for teaching and assessing writing skills with children with learning disabilities Contains strategies for working with all students that struggle with writing Offers classroom-tested strategies, helpful information, 100+ writing samples with guidelines for analysis, and handy progress-monitoring charts Includes ideas for motivating reluctant writers Mather is an expert in the field of learning disabilities and is the best-selling author of Essentials of Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement Assessment