Book Description

Intended to guide writing teachers through the complexities of evaluation, the essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches to evaluation. The essays display, however, some common beliefs about what is fundamentally important to writing teachers' work--specifically, the need: to distinguish between "grading" and "evaluation"; to develop the ability to describe students' writing; to connect teaching and evaluation; and to continually reexamine assumptions and practices that guide evaluation. Following an introduction by the editors, the 17 essays and their authors are, as follows: (1) "Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work" (Lee Odell); (2) "What We Know about Genres, and How It Can Help Us Assign and Evaluate Writing" (Charles R. Cooper); (3) "Audience Considerations for Evaluating Writing" (Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Elizabeth Vander Lei, and Duane H. Roen); (4) "Coaching Writing Development: Syntax Revisited, Options Explored" (William Strong); (5) "Cohesion and Coherence" (Martha Kolln); (6) "Assessing Portfolios" (Sandra Murphy); (7) "How to Read a Science Portfolio" (Denise Stavis Levine); (8) "Using Writing to Assess Mathematics Pedagogy and Students' Understanding" (Richard S. Millman); (9) "Evaluating Student Writing about History" (Kathleen Medina); (10) "Evaluating Students' Response Strategies in Writing about Literature" (Richard W. Beach); (11) "Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: The Case of the African American Vernacular English Speaker" (Arnetha F. Ball); (12) "Latino ESL Students and the Development of Writing Abilities" (Guadalupe Valdes and Patricia Anloff Sanders); (13) "Texts in Contexts: Understanding Chinese Students' English Compositions" (Guanjun Cai); (14) "Reflective Reading: Developing Thoughtful Ways To Respond to Students' Writing" (Chris M. Anson); (15) "Creating a Climate for Portfolios" (Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith); (16) "Integrating Reading and Writing in Large-Scale Assessment" (Fran Claggett); and (17) "Let Them Experiment: Accommodating Diverse Discourse Practices in Large-Scale Writing Assessment" (Roxanne Mountford). (NKA)