Writing Changes in Education System

11/20/2017

Writing is a core skill needed for success in both education and the workplace. Yet the writing proficiency among American students has been below expectation. Only 2 percent of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders scored at the advanced level, and roughly a quarter scored at the proficient level in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment.

The National Commission on Writing has called for a National Writing Agenda that includes the recommendation that "assessments of student writing must go beyond multiple-choice, machine-scorable items. Assessment should provide students with adequate time to write and should require students to actually create a piece of prose". The SAT writing section was introduced to reinforce this recommendation. The College Board introduced the writing section to affirm that writing is essential for postsecondary success, and that more attention to writing is needed in K-12 education. Our advocacy and initiatives in the domain of writing, as well as the SAT writing section and essays from customwriting.com, are intended to strengthen writing in our nation's schools and colleges, reinforce the importance of writing skills throughout a student's education, enhance all students' chances of academic success, and help administrators to determine students' readiness to successfully meet postsecondary writing demands.

The SAT writing section is composed of two multiplechoice components (one of 25 minutes and one of 10 minutes) and a 25-minute essay. The 49 multiple-choice questions are combined to produce a scaled writing subscore from 20 to 80. These questions focus on improving sentences, identifying sentence errors, and improving paragraphs. The essay measures skill in developing a point of view on an issue. The essay is scored by two trained readers on a scale of 1-6, and those scores are combined to produce a raw subscore of 2 to 12. 1 The multiple-choice and essay subscores are ultimately combined to form a total score for the SAT writing section on the standard SAT 200-800 point scale.

Study Purpose

It has been about two years since the writing section was first implemented. The purpose of this study was to learn whether there have been any changes in writing instruction across K-12 education in the past three years. A three-year time frame was chosen to structure the study as it included the time period subsequent to the College Board's first announcement of the SAT writing section, and the writing section's first administration.

A secondary goal of this study was to determine whether the SAT writing section had any influence on changes in writing instruction. This is referred to as the "near-term" impact of the SAT writing section, and is similar to the notion of consequential validity. Consequential validity pertains to the social consequences of using a particular test for a particular purpose. It is important to gather evidence of positive consequences of using a test as well as evidence that any adverse consequences are minimal.

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