In a Pilot Study, Student Writing In Class Gauged

By Robert Rothman

WASHINGTON--In what top federal officials called a significant advance in the state of the art, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has concluded that it can conduct a large-scale assessment of students' writing abilities by using their classroom work.

Releasing a study based on in-class writing samples from about 2,000 4th and 8th graders, the officials said last week that NAEP was able to classify and evaluate widely different pieces on a comparable basis.

But the results of the pilot study, the officials acknowledged, suggest that the capabilities of the assessment itself may have surpassed the level of writing instruction in many schools. Although the study was not based on a representative sample of students, it found little evidence of the types of practices school-based writing assessment is expected to capture, such as the use of "pre-writing'' strategies and other techniques of the writing process and the composition of a...