Correlates of Writing Performance and Interest: A U.S. National Assessment Study.

To extend research findings on educational effectiveness beyond multiple-choice outcomes, we related the written composition and writing motivation scores of a random sample of 288 17-year-old students, from a larger U.S. sample of 28,860, to a selection of possible educational and environmental influences on learning. The relations generally corroborated previous findings, but they were considerably smaller than those found in previous analyses of national and international surveys. Writing performance was considerably less predictable than writing motivation, perhaps because of students' generally poor achievement on the writing task. purpose in this article is to report analyses of correlates of essay performance among 17-yearolds participating in the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (henceforth, National Assessment). Such analyses are important because they potentially reveal the extent to which factors that promote achievement also promote written expression. The hypothesis guiding the study was that the nine factors shown in many previous studies to influence standardized achievement and subject matter interest also promote writing and student views of the importance of writing. The National Assessment periodically tests scientific samples of students in primary, middle, and secondary schools to measure progress in subjects such as reading, science, mathematics, and civics. Performance is compared over time, by parts of the country, and by types of students. Similarly, the International Association for the Study of Educational Achievement, with some 50 member countries, compares nations in subject matter achievement; two provinces, British Colombia and Ontario, have also participated. As countries gain more experience in surveying performance, they can improve the methodology of the research and raise educational effectiveness. The mastery of English writing, the subject of the research reported here, is a good example. Because writing must be subjectively and laboriously judged, few large-scale provincewide, nationwide, and international studies have been conducted. The present research, though extensive, should be considered preliminary to larger scale efforts. The results, however, can be compared with previous national and international assessments of reading, science, and other school subjects that are easier to evaluate than writing is. The findings of our research can also be compared with the results of syntheses of hundreds of small-scale studies carried out in Australia, Canada, England, and the United States. Psychological theory suggests that academic achievement is determined by five primary factors -student age, ability, motivation, the amount of instruction, and the quality of instructionand four supportive or substitutive factors the psychological environments of the classroom, home, peer group outside the school, and mass media, particularly television, to which students are exposed. Dozens of syntheses of studies of the nine factors show their consistent association with learning outcomes (Walberg, 1986). We tested the set of nine factors insofar as they were represented in the National Assessment data; the study, however, was unique, for it employed actual writing performance rather than a multiplechoice measure of achievement as the outcome indicator. The nine productivity factors can be divided into three sets: (a) aptitude includes student ability or prior achievement, motivation, and age or developmental level; (b) instruction is indexed by its quantity (or amount of time) and quality (or appropriateness) for the student; (c) the Address correspondence to Herbert J. Walberg, College oj Education (M/C 147), The University of Illinois at Chicago, Box 4348, Chicago, IL 60680.