Product Description: Jane Bell Kiester is back with more classroom-proven techniques that make you look good. This time, she takes the dread out of the state writing assessment test -- and you and your students win! With four easy steps, students improve their scores...read more

Product Description: Giving constructive feedback to student writers is critical to their success. But finding the right words can be difficult…until now. In this guide, Ruth Culham provides 100 trait-specific comments that address essential writing skills...read more

Product Description: The earlier that teachers think about instruction, and the sooner that students self-assess their progress, the better the final writing product will be. What Student Writing Teaches Us: Formative Assessment in the Writing Workshop provides practical suggestions for teachers of writing...read more

Provides ideas for comments to give to students when evaluating writing exercises, with each comment categorized according to its corresponding writing trait.

Product Description: In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory?By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition...read more

Hardly a day goes by in America without talk of testing students to higher standards as a means to improve our education system. In The Testing Trap, George Hillocks puts this logic to the test. Through interviews with over three hundred teachers and administrators, Hillocks examines whether state writing tests in Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, New York, and Texas do what they are supposed to do: Improve education. Ultimately, Hillocks argues that the majority of existing tests actually have a harmful effect on the way students are taught to write. In The Testing Trap, Hillocks demonstrates how the structure of assessment is actually responsible for the low level of thinking encouraged and reinforced in American classrooms. It is his contention that although politicians call for excellence, the tests that they create, and the formulaic writing they accept as passing, actually point to mediocrity as their true aim. In this way, political objectives are easily achieved but our children suffer the consequences. The Testing Trap is a provocative and essential read for administrators, teachers, parents, policymakers, legislators, voters, and all who care about the education of our children. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Jane Bell Kiester is back with more classroom-proven techniques that make you look good. This time, she takes the dread out of the state writing assessment test -- and you and your students win! With four easy steps, students improve their scores...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection of twenty-five brief papers is based on a vital premise: that when classrooms become places where teachers engage in close-up studies of what learning is and how it happens, better teaching and learning result. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Applebee, Arthur N.

Product Description: Elucidating the different components essential for effective written communication, this examination of current approaches to the evaluation and remediation of deficient writing skills identifies the crucial issues to be addressed and outlines appropriate assessment procedures...read more

Product Description: Book by Davis, Barbara Gross, Scriven, Michael, Thomas, Susan

Product Description: "information writing is used to present information and share ideas"

Product Description: This book is a reproduction of a volume found in the collection of the University of Michigan Library. It is produced from digital images created through the Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The digital images for this book were cleaned and prepared for printing through automatic processes...read more