Assessing Writing Across the Curriculum offers guidelines for effective assessment of student writing performance in various content areas such as English, science, mathematics and social studies at the junior or senior high school level. The book suggests a change in teaching methodology in order to make writing a key part of the instructional process. Written by teachers, it offers examples of applications and tools for assessment, concluding with a list of additional resources for further research. Assessing Writing Across the Curriculum addresses issues such as assignment design, communication of expectations, scoring rubric design, and student involvement in writing assessment. It emphasizes writing to learn versus writing to test. This change in emphasis allows the student to understand how writing can contribute to his or her thinking and learning about a subject. The book utilizes the knowledge editors Duke and Sanchez have accumulated in directing National Writing Project sites and in their extensive in-service work on writing assessment with teachers.

As the amount of curriculum in today's classrooms expands and teaching time seems to shrink, teachers are looking for ways to integrate content area and writing instruction. In this revised and expanded edition of Writing Across the Curriculum, Shelley Peterson shows teachers how to weave writing and content area instruction together in their classrooms. The author provides practical and helpful ideas for classroom teachers and content-area specialists to easily incorporate writer's workshop while teaching in their subject area. New features in this second edition include: - internet websites that can be used to teach writing (e.g., wiki's, weblogs, and digital storytelling) - examples from grades 4-8 classrooms that show how science, social studies, health, and mathematics teachers can also be teachers of poetry, narrative, and non-narrative writing - new assessment scoring guides - information on working with struggling writers and supporting English Language Learners - graphic organizers, templates, and mini-lessons that engage students in learning

Noting that the term "assessment" sounds formal and institutional and frequently generates fear and anxiety, this book presents 14 essays that demonstrate that assessment can help students, teachers, and administrators in writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs learn about what they are doing well and about how they might do better. The first set of essays in the book focus on informal, formative WAC assessments; the second set discuss more formal efforts to assess WAC; and a concluding essay provides a theoretical and historical look at WAC assessment. After a preface, "The WAC Archives Revisited" (Toby Fulwiler and Art Young), essays in the book are: (1) "Introduction--Assumptions about Assessing WAC Programs: Some Axioms, Some Observations, Some Context" (Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot); (2) "From Conduit to Customer: The Role of WAC Faculty in WAC Assessment" (Barbara Walvoord); (3) "Documenting Excellence in Teaching and Learning in WAC Programs" (Joyce Kinkead); (4) "Contextual Evaluation in WAC Programs: Theories, Issues, and Strategies for Teachers" (Cynthia L. Selfe); (5) "Beyond Accountability: Reading with Faculty as Partners across the Disciplines" (Brian Huot); (6) "How Portfolios for Proficiency Help Shape a WAC Program" (Christopher Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawicki); (7) "Listening as Assessment: How Students and Teachers Evaluate WAC" (Larry Beason and Laurel Darrow); (8) "Program Review, Program Renewal" (Charles Moran and Anne Herrington); (9) "The Crazy Quilt of Writing across the Curriculum: Achieving WAC Program Assessment" (Meg Morgan); (10) "Integrating WAC into General Education: An Assessment Case Study" (Martha A. Townsend); (11) "Adventures in the WAC Assessment Trade: Reconsidering the Link between Research and Consultation" (Raymond Smith and Christine Farris); (12) "Research and WAC Evaluation: An In-Progress Reflection" (Paul Prior, Gail E. Hawisher, Sibylle Gruber, and Nicole MacLaughlin); (13) "WAC Assessment and Internal Audiences: A Dialogue" (Richard Haswell and Susan McLeod); and (14) "Pragmatism, Positivism, and Program Evaluation" (Michael M. Williamson). (RS)

"Brian Huot's well-reasoned, provocative discourse on primary conceptions in the field will be of significant value to scholars in writing and writing assessment, to writing program adminstrators, to readers in educational assessment, and to graduate students in rhetoric and composition."--BOOK JACKET.

In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is “more than” its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts.

With this updated document, IRA and NCTE reaffirm their position that the primary purpose of assessment must be to improve teaching and learning for all students. Eleven core standards are presented and explained, and a helpful glossary makes this document suitable not only for educators but for parents, policymakers, school board members, and other stakeholders. Case studies of large-scale national tests and smaller scale classroom assessments (particularly in the context of RTI, or Response to Intervention) are used to highlight how assessments in use today do or do not meet the standards.

This reference guide traces the "Writing Across the Curriculum" movement from its origins in British secondary education through its flourishing in American higher education and extension to American primary and secondary education.