Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

As a result of the Japanese Ministry of Education's recent edict that students' written and spoken English should be assessed in university entrance exams, there is an urgent need for tools to help teachers and students prepare for these exams. Although some commercial tools already exist, they are generally expensive and inflexible. To address…

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their…

This article is an extract from a longer research article originally published in the journal "English in Education." It describes a parallel situation in Australia where high-stakes assessment led to stereotyped writing, endless test practice and widespread student disengagement.

This article addresses how an educational purpose of social efficiency, such as the one we have in England, affects each child's school Life-history and the process through which children thereby come to identify themselves. The author considers whether schools could engage in practices that decrease pupils' resignation to a system that controls…

This paper is an overview of the writing skill in the lower levels of learning in the contemporary society. The following areas of writing are highlighted: the writing programme and its goals, the basic methodology for writing tasks, broad groups of writing skills, the teaching of the writing skills in pre-primary and primary schools where…

Scholars have given little attention to testing's influence on the outcomes of university English preparatory programs (UEPP). Variations on the two main classifications of writing evaluation, the holistic and the analytic were examined. The objectives were to identify the assumptions for inclusion of writing in UEPPs, analyze the skills and…

This paper presents a special issue on writing around the globe. Researchers from across the world describe writing practices in their country using a wide variety of methodology. The papers show that while there are many similarities in writing instruction from one country to the next, there are also many differences. As a result, the authors…

Recent literature on the use of exemplars in the context of higher education has shown that exemplar-based instruction is implemented in various disciplines; nevertheless, how exemplar-based instruction can be implemented in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing classrooms in higher education institutions remains under-explored. In this…

Determining the writing skill level of students commencing tertiary education is a key element in predicting their likely study success and in providing appropriate writing development opportunities. Writing tests constructed around written instructions often assume high levels of reading and comprehension skills, which in some instances impose…

This paper presents a method for equating writing assessments using pairwise comparisons which does not depend upon conventional common-person or common-item equating designs. Pairwise comparisons have been successfully applied in the assessment of open-ended tasks in English and other areas such as visual art and philosophy. In this paper,…

Purpose: This paper argues that in a well-organised school with strong leadership and vision coupled with a concerted effort to improve the teaching performance of each teacher, student achievement can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that while macro-effect sizes such as "whole of school" metrics are useful for…

The purpose of this booklet is to provide administrators, teachers, and students in Alberta, Canada, with samples of students' writing that exemplify the criteria used to score students' written responses on the June 1991 Grade 9 Social Studies Achievement Test. The Grade 9 Social Studies Achievement Test consisted of two parts: Part A: Multiple…

This collection of student essays provides illustrations of the criteria used to grade the composition portion of the sixth-grade achievement test used in Alberta (Canada). An introductory section describes the procedures for selecting the essays used, establishing scoring norms, and scoring the tests, and offers general comments on the writing…

This booklet contains some examples of the assessment items used in the fifth English language survey of the Assessment of Achievement Programme (AAP). The examples in the booklet are intended to provide teachers with a clear idea of the range of items used in the survey in the hope that they will provide material for personal professional…