This symposium enacts a debate over a high-stakes question for writing studies: How does standardization within and across writing programs enable or constrain our democratic aspirations? It includes: (1) "Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Assessment " (Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein); (2) "Assessment, Coherence, and…

With the exponential increase of digital assessment, different types of data in addition to item responses become available in the measurement process. One of the salient features in digital assessment is that process data can be easily collected. This non-conventional structured or unstructured data source may bring new perspectives to better…

This conceptual article discusses a collaborative approach to building teacher capacity to support multilingual learners in secondary science classrooms. The article advocates for the collaborative analysis of student writing samples and the sharing of pedagogical insights between English language and content area teachers. Samples of student…

The literature on using scoring rubrics in writing assessment denotes the significance of rubrics as practical and useful means to assess the quality of writing tasks. This study tries to investigate the agreement among rubrics endorsed and used for assessing the essay writing tasks by the internationally recognized tests of English language…

The simple view of writing suggests that written composition results from oral language, transcription (e.g., spelling/handwriting), and self-regulation skills, coordinated within working memory. The model provides a number of implications for the interpretation of psychoeducational achievement batteries. For instance, it hypothesizes that writing…

The resiliency of literacy clinics was tested during 2020-2021, as many pivoted from in-person (F2F) to online or 3-way remote learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic. University-based literacy clinics advance teacher education, provide services to K-12 students who may need instructional support, and are a laboratory for research. The purpose…

Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

Writing in English as a second or additional language has become an important skill that can be applied in many areas of human activity. As we become a society within which written text is an important instrument that helps create new ideas, services, and products, English text is often used as a preferred mode of communication. Traditionally…

Studies on automatic scoring systems in writing assessments have also evaluated the relationship between human and machine scores for the reliability of automated essay scoring systems. This study investigated the magnitudes of indices for inter-rater agreement and discrepancy, especially regarding human and machine scoring, in writing assessment.…

The Policy-Advocacy-Leadership column is developed to initiate and facilitate important dialogue about educational policy, occupational therapy practice, and to develop and share the knowledge, tools, and resources that enable occupational therapy practitioners to be effective advocates for their clients and profession. In this column, we discuss…

Emerging bilingual learners' biliteracy abilities are often underestimated when monolingual reading assessments, such as the DIBELS, are used to identify students as having difficulties in learning or to guide literacy instruction. The authors propose a holistic form of biliterate assessment that uses writing as a means to understand what emerging…

Purpose: This study aims to broaches several endemic challenges for academics who support doctoral writing: writers are emotionally protective of their own writing; writing a thesis in English as a second language is a challenging, complex task; and advising across cultures is delicate. Giving constructive feedback kindly, but with the rigour…

Researchers studying curriculum-based measurement of written expression have used a variety of writing prompt types and durations when establishing criterion validity of these tools. The purpose of this study was to determine through meta-analytic procedures whether any prompt type or duration was superior to others in terms of criterion validity.…

Anonymity has been suggested as a way to mitigate the possible negative effects of interpersonal variables that may arise during the peer review process. However, since anonymity is not always possible, it is important to consider how the level of familiarity between peers may influence the peer review process. This study therefore explores the…

This study reports on student writing outcomes from a two-year interdisciplinary collaboration between applied linguists (the authors) and an organizational behavior (OB) professor. We used an ethnographic language-focused approach to make explicit the linguistic features of the case analysis genre at an American university in the Middle East. We…