Many states have adopted minimal competency testing in reading or writing, assuming that goals of basic education are measurable and that testing for such goals is technologically feasible. It is not clear that such testing comes at a time in history when the quality of education is demonstrably lower than at other times in American education. The…

This report is a summary of the Basic Skills Task Force activities covering the period from August 1982 to June 30, 1983. The Task Force was created by the West Virginia Board of Education in 1982. The report provides information on the historical background of the Task Force, a summary of how it functioned, and recommendations of the Task Force…

A study was designed to identify highly teachable composing skills that have a strong statistical relationship with composition quality across various grade levels. Sample compositions were randomly selected from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (1972). A total of 750 compositions written by 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old-students (250…

This report describes the procedures followed in scoring the October 1978 Florida Minimal Writing Production Skills Assessment and reports the results of that assessment. The assessment was conducted on a sample of Florida public school students in grades 3, 5, 8, and 11. Sections include descriptions of the rating scale and scorer's guide as well…

The South Carolina Basic Skills Assessment Program (BSAP), a testing program, presents information to determine how successfully children in individual school districts are achieving the minimum basic skills required by South Carolina law. Each year BSAP tests are given to children entering the first grade and to children in grades 1, 2, 3, 6, 8,…

A four-year study by the Bay Area Writing Project was conducted to determine the writing competency of inner-city secondary school students on proficiency tests. To determine whether patterns among secondary students reflected developmental trends, the study also examined samples of student writing from grades 4 through 12, for the years 1978,…

This paper examined the status of assessment of writing as it is currently performed in the United States. All fifty states and the District of Columbia responded to a survey requesting information on their testing programs. Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia were found to assess writing on the statewide level, and eight states were in…

The five articles in this journal issue are intended for use by school administrators, and provide information on how to organize effective programs for achieving student writing competency. The first article discusses the development of New York State's Preliminary and Regents Competency Tests in Writing, analyzes sample student responses to one…

This booklet contains selected proceedings of the 1979 conference entitled "Competency Testing and Beyond: Improving Student Writing" held in Albany, New York. Topics covered in the 17 selections are: the "real" world and the teaching of English, what has been learned about competency testing in writing, the composing process, diagnosing student…

In an examination of the implications and effects of the competency testing movement on the discipline of English, the six chapters of this book answer major questions concerning what competency in English is, what is known about the assessment of competence in English, and how minimal competency in English can be defined and assessed. The first…

The Regents Competency Testing Program has been designed to assure that all students develop adequate skills in reading comprehension, writing, and mathematics before graduation from high school in New York. This bulletin provides information on two of the program's three basic elements that contribute to the accomplishment of this goal. First,…

A cooperative writing assessment program between a college and seven public school districts was designed to demonstrate that the writing skills necessary for adequate composing were not those that could be measured by an objective test. The goals of the program were to (1) analyze the rhetorical skills of sixth and eighth grade students, (2)…

The New York Regents Competency Testing Program has been designed to assure that all students develop adequate skills in reading comprehension, writing, and mathematics before graduation from high school. In this booklet, information is provided on two elements of the Regents Competency Testing Program: diploma standards and screening tests.…

California's Pupil Proficiency Law requires each local school district to adopt standards of proficiency in the basic skills of reading comprehension, writing, and computation. Students are to be assessed in grades 4-11. Students not making sufficient progress towards meeting the district's standards are to be provided with remedial programs, and…

The hypothesis that role-playing scenarios specifying full rhetorical contexts were a superior means of eliciting valid writing samples for the purpose of assessing compositional skills of prospective Florida teachers was tested. In addition, topics for use on the initial administrations of the Florida Teacher Competency Examination's writing…