EIGHTH-GRADERS TO BE IN STEATEWIDE ESSAY PROJECT

Missouri teachers will score 65,000 handwritten compositions by eighth-grade students in a statewide project to assess the writing skills of the students.

On Nov. 7-8, about 550 teachers will work with state education officials to score all the essays. In fact, every student's essay will be evaluated at least twice by different teachers.

The results of the massive assessment will be returned to local school districts in 1992 so that they will have a better picture of their students' writing skills.

The Missouri Writing Assessment project, organized by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, is being conducted this fall for the second time. Department officials believe the program may be the biggest state-level writing project in the country that involves grading by local teachers.

Missouri Commissioner of Education Robert E. Bartman said: "National assessments indicate that most American students are poor writers. The goal of this project is to give us a better idea of how Missouri students are doing in this critical area. More importantly, though, we hope the project will stimulate schools to adopt new methods for teaching and assessing writing."

Bartman said he is pleased with the results of the first Missouri Writing Assessment conducted in 1990. Last fall, staff of the state education agency coordinated the work of about 450 teachers who made up the statewide grading team. More than 54,000 compositions were collected and scored. The teachers worked in separate regional groups to score all the papers.

In this project, teachers use a method called "holistic scoring." Based on pre-established criteria developed from a study of student papers, teachers are taught to rate each essay on a scale that ranges from "no response" to a top score of 6.

In the 1990 assessment, Bartman said, nearly 65 percent of eighth-graders received a better-than-expected rating of 3.5 or higher on the 6-point scale.