ERIC Number: ED311067
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1986
Pages: 28
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Read-Comp as an Additional Measure of Writing Ability.
Aghbar, Ali-Asghar
The effectiveness of the "read-comp" technique in assessing writing ability and the usefulness of a rubric and procedure devised for scoring read-comp samples and essays were evaluated. Subjects were 100 freshman students enrolled in general and remedial English classes in a 6-week summer session at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The test battery consisted of two writing tasks. The first was a 20-minute essay. The second, the read-comp procedure, required students to read a paragraph in 2 minutes and then prepare a paragraph on that information in 7 minutes. The rubric developed for the study, which took account of sentence level and discourse level characteristics, was called guided impressionistic scoring, and was designed to be less subjective than purely holistic scoring. Two scorers trained in the method examined all the essays and read-comp paragraphs. Inter-scorer reliability was 0.76 for the essay and 0.85 for the read-comp. There was a strong interrelationship between subscores assigned by each scorer for the read-comp. Both the inter-scorer reliability and the inter-scorer interrelationship among subscores suggested that the scoring of the read-comp was more successful than was the essay scoring. Validity studies suggested that each test evaluates areas not touched by the other; together they can provide a fuller profile of writing ability. The scoring rubric and test examples are appended. (SLD)
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Tests/Questionnaires
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A