Writing is often included in portfolios. Lynette Hill, an English and language arts specialist at the state's education department, offers some tools for assessing student writing. Hill helped develop Idaho's direct writing assessment and is the state's writing competency course coordinator. Idaho conducts writing assessments in grades four, eight, and 11. Twelve experts would say 12 different things about one piece.
Standards help reduce the subjectivity of scoring.
To help teachers use standards in assessing their students' writing, Idaho publishes booklets of the areas that will be measured in each of the grade levels that are officially measured, as well as three additional grade levels. The booklets contain the rationale for the testing as well as the writing terms and vocabulary students are expected to know and how they will be scored. An advanced paper for a fourth-grader, for instance, is a uniquely developed topic with details related to time, place, characters, and plot using figurative language in a vibrant, consistent voice with varied sentence length, among other things. No credibility without accountability D avid Breithaupt, a research and evaluation analyst for the Idaho Department of Education, is an unabashed numbers zealot. A buoyant man with a booming voice and a gusto for his topic, he strides through the conference audience, looming close to make a point at first one table, then another.