Sarmiento Cherish M, Truckenmiller Adrea J, Cho Eunsoo, Wang Heqiao
School of Teacher Education and Leadership, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA.
Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
Br J Educ Psychol. 2025 Jun;95(2):384-404. doi: 10.1111/bjep.12724. Epub 2024 Nov 3.
Learning to write the complex academic language (AL) associated with a discipline (like science) is a critical task in education, with middle school being a key developmental period. However, we need more research to guide how we assess students' learning to write AL, especially if we want to create assessment that guides more effective instruction.
We evaluated middle school students' informational writing for six different measures of AL to determine which ones were most strongly related to writing quality and were most indicative of the unique features of informational writing. We also examined which metrics were sensitive to growth across middle school.
Our sample consists of informational compositions from 285 students in Grade 5 (n = 175) and Grade 8 (n = 110) in a Midwestern state in the United States.
Path modelling was used to determine the degree to which the AL metrics are associated with writing quality and narrativity in each grade.
Overall, the six measures of AL explained 70% of the variance in students' writing quality. We found that a new measure, number of long words, outperformed other more established measures at the word level and should be used in assessment of informational writing quality. We also found that automated scores at the sentence level better detected development across middle school grade levels than typical rubrics of writing quality.
Results provide promising avenues for the assessment of malleable aspects of AL in middle school informational writing.
学习撰写与某一学科（如科学）相关的复杂学术语言（AL）是教育中的一项关键任务，初中是一个关键的发展阶段。然而，我们需要更多研究来指导如何评估学生撰写学术语言的学习情况，特别是如果我们想要创建能够指导更有效教学的评估方式。
我们评估了中学生信息性写作的六种不同学术语言指标，以确定哪些指标与写作质量最密切相关，并且最能体现信息性写作的独特特征。我们还研究了哪些指标对初中阶段的成长敏感。
我们的样本包括美国中西部一个州285名五年级（n = 175）和八年级（n = 110）学生的信息性作文。
采用路径建模来确定每个年级学术语言指标与写作质量和叙事性的关联程度。
总体而言，六种学术语言指标解释了学生写作质量70%的方差。我们发现，一个新指标，即长单词数量，在单词层面上比其他更成熟的指标表现更好，应被用于评估信息性写作质量。我们还发现，句子层面的自动评分比典型的写作质量评分标准更能检测出初中各年级的发展情况。
研究结果为评估初中信息性写作中学术语言的可塑方面提供了有前景的途径。
