Procedures and Results of an Evaluation of Writing

Extensive public concern has been expressed in the 1970's about the effectiveness of public school instruction in reading, writing and mathematics (cf. Copperman, 1980; Newsweek, 1975), Despite this concern, no public school district, to my knowledge has carried out a comprehensive, district-wide evaluation of language arts instruction. Two likely reasons exist to account for this. First, the curriculum area known as language arts covers five large subareas: handwriting, language usage, spelling, listening and speaking, and writing. It is difficult to measure all the resources allocated to language arts instruction and the way these resources are used in each subarea in all schools. It is also very difficult to collect large numbers of valid and reliable measures of student ability across all of these areas. Secondly, in the subarea of writing, this difficulty is compounded by the absence of standardized tests and the labor intensive methods used to analyze writing samples. The Eugene, Oregon school district is the third largest in Oregon: 20,000 students and 1,100 teachers. In the fall of 1977, the Eugene School Board directed its Research, Development and Evaluation (RD&E) unit to look at the district's writing instruction. As one part of its evaluation, RD&E studied writing exercises obtained from a one-third random sample of the district's sixth graders. This paper contributes to evaluation theory by describing the methodology and results of a study of writing and spelling ability. In this paper, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two customary methods for analyzing students' writing, show how these methods may be combined and describe an effective way of providing useable evaluation information to principals and teachers. The work described here is only one small part of what a thorough evaluation of language arts instruction would entail.