What is the most fair and efficient way to assess the writing performance of students? Although the question gained importance during the US educational accountability movement of the 1980s and 1990s, the issue had preoccupied international language experts and evaluators long before. One answer to the question, the assessment method known as holistic scoring, is central to understanding writing in academic settings.
 
Early Holistic Scoring of Writing addresses the history of holistic essay assessment in the United Kingdom and the United States from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s—and newly conceptualizes holistic scoring by philosophically and reflectively reinterpreting the genre’s origin, development, and significance.
 
The book chronicles holistic scoring from its initial origin in the United Kingdom to the beginning of its heyday in the United States. Chapters cover little-known history, from the holistic scoring of school certificate examination essays written by Blitz evacuee children in Devon during WWII to teacher adaptations of holistic scoring in California schools during the 1970s. Chapters detail the complications, challenges, and successes of holistic scoring from British high-stakes admissions examinations to foundational pedagogical research by Bay Area Writing Project scholars. The book concludes with lessons learned, providing a guide for continued efforts to assess student writing through evidence models.
 
Exploring the possibility of actionable history, Early Holistic Scoring of Writing reconceptualizes writing assessment. Here is a new history that retells the origins of our present body of knowledge in writing studies.

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active.

Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.

Reading and evaluating student writing is a time-consuming process, yet it is a vital part of both student placement and coursework at post-secondary institutions. In recent years, commercial computer-evaluation programs have been developed to score student essays in both of these contexts. Two-year colleges have been especially drawn to these programs, but four-year institutions are moving to them as well, because of the cost-savings they promise. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the programs have been written, and institutions are installing them, without attention to their instructional validity or adequacy.

Since the education software companies are moving so rapidly into what they perceive as a promising new market, a wider discussion of machine-scoring is vital if scholars hope to influence development and/or implementation of the programs being created. What is needed, then, is a critical resource to help teachers and administrators evaluate programs they might be considering, and to more fully envision the instructional consequences of adopting them. And this is the resource that Ericsson and Haswell are providing here.