Richard L. Larson SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ON THE EVALUATION OF STUDENTS' ACHIEVEMENTS IN COMPOSITION

I present here a selection from the large, and growing, body of literature on responding to and evaluating students' composing skills in courses and tests. The selection, obviously, is my personal choice-the books and essays that seem to me most conspicuously to contribute to our knowledge of how to judge student writing.* I group my selections according to the purposes that seem to underlie the authors' work. First, and perhaps most helpful to the classroom teacher, come essays designed to advise teachers on how to react to students' writing as part of the instruction in a writing course. Though the teacher can probably never quite escape the role of authority figure and judge in dealing with students' papers, the essays in this group suggest how the teacher can act more as guide or coach than as judgecan suggest to the student what he or she has accomplished, or not accomplished, and what steps he might take to add to the accomplishments, either in revising the paper being looked at or in attempting the next one. The perspectives from which the guidance is given differ (my own piece, for instance, invites the teacher to look at the student's paper, as a whole, as a completed act of using language, and to suggest ways in which that act of using language for a particular purpose might be strengthened); different users of the bibliography will find different approaches to student papers congenial to them, and that varied response will be entirely appropriate, since none of the suggested perspectives or approaches has been shown by research studies to be the best, or a better, way to respond to students' work. The second group of essays, quite small, deals openly with the task of making judgments about students' writing. Here the judgments discussed