How Well Do Students Write?
NAEP assesses students’ writing achievement with an extensive set of on-demand writing tasks developed through a consensus process involving teachers, administrators, and scholars from around the country. Assessments may include 20 to 25 different tasks at each grade level, designed to assess students’ abilities to write imaginatively, persuasively, and informatively, including the ability to analyze and synthesize. In emphasis, the NAEP tasks parallel the writing components of many state assessments, but the national sampling plan allows more tasks to be assessed each year than any state or district is able to include in their assessments. Each student response is scored using a focused holistic rubric that Omega Seamaster Replica includes components for purpose, audience, idea development/support, organization/ structure, sentence structure, word choice, voice, and mechanics. Results across students are pooled statistically to provide estimates of group performance on a standardized writing scale (ranging initially from 0–500), which NAEP uses to estimate performance levels. Aware that on-demand assessment might differ from classroom-based performance, NAEP has also systematically assessed classroom-based writing, with quite similar results (Gentile, Martin-Rehrmann, and Kennedy).
In 2007, between 80% and 90% of middle school and high school students had achieved what NAEP identifies as “basic” writing skills appropriate to their grade level, but only 31% at Grade 8 and 23% at Grade 12 were rated as “proficient.” In the NAEP framework, being proficient at Grade 12 means a student is “able to produce an effectively organized and fully developed response within the time allowed [the specific amount of allotted time has varied in recent years from 15 to 50 minutes] that uses analytical, evaluative, or creative thinking. Their writing should include details that sup?port and develop the main idea of the piece, and it should show that these students are able to use precise language and variety in sentence structure to engage the audience they are expected to address” (Loomis and Bourque 10). Gaps in achievement in 2007 were large, with only 8% of Black twelfth-grade students and 11% of Hispanic twelfth-grade students rated as proficient, compared with 29% of their White peers.
Looking more broadly at NAEP data makes it clear both how deeply ingrained this pattern is and how widespread are the inequities in achievement. Figure 1 summarizes long-term trends in literacy achievement on a 0–500 scale that allows comparisons over time and across grades. The most complete data are for reading achievement across the period 1971–2004 (the last long-term trend reading assessment for which data are available); results for a similar set of measures of writing achievement for the 12-year period from 1984 to 1996 are superimposed on those for reading. Although some year-to-year fluctuations in Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches both reading and writing achievement are statistically significant, the most striking aspect of the chart is how slow changes in performance have been. The youngest students (9-year-olds/Grade 4) showed the greatest gain–11 points on
the 500-point scale over 33 years; the oldest students (17-year-olds/Grade 12) showed no change at all, with 13-year-olds in between, with a 4-point gain across this 33-year span of time.
Trends in Literacy Achievement:
The relatively modest gains for students as a whole mask some significant improvements for historically underachieving subgroups. Across the 29-year span for which data can be disaggregated, the gaps between White students and their His?panic and Black peers narrowed at all three ages
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