Essay Prompts and Topics

Abstract

These studies investigated the degree to which prompts and topic types affect the writing performance of college freshmen. The students (N = 3,452) taking the 1989 and 1990 Manoa Writing Placement Examination (MWPE) were required to write in response to two types of topics (for a total of 6,904 essays): one in response to a reading passage and another in response to a question based on personal experience. Ten such prompt sets were used in this study. Study 1 indicated that the MWPE testing procedures were reasonably reliable and consistent across semesters but that student responses to individual prompts and prompt sets were significantly different from each other. Study 2 showed that if two topic types and a large number of prompts are involved, the differences that arise in the performance on prompts or topic types can be minimized by examining the students' mean scores and changing the pairings so that the prompt sets are more equitable in subsequent administrations.

Is there an indication for the existence of right-handed weak currents in nuclear beta decay?

“…As we did for the 0++0+ transitions, we first discuss also for '%e the various radiative and Z-dependent corrections to f. we start with the parametrization i23j of the f factor which indudes the outer radiative corrections of order a. As in this parametrization the recoil correction is approximated by a constant factor, we prefered to evaluate this correction using the complete expression of the recoil corrections Two types of calculation [16,17] of the valence nucleon mismatch correction yieid for ?Ne resuits in reasonable agreement: (1 -6,) = 0.9962 1291 and (1 -6,) = 0.9975 [30]. However, as discussed in section 2.1, these corrections do not take into account the mismatch of the core nucleons.…”

Effects of Viewing Displays from Different Distances on Human Visual System

“…Moreover, not only was the statistical significance calculated, but also, the effect size based on the partial eta-squared value (η 2 ). The partial eta-squared indicates the percentage of the variance in the dependent variables attributable to the particular independent variables [46].…”

Lexical repetiton in academic discourse: a computer-aided study of the text organizing role of repetition

“…The topic has been found to influence students' performance (Weigle, 2004). Similarly, various topic prompts have also lead to significant differences in students' scores (Brown, Hilgers, & Marsella, 1991). This is a major concern regarding the cognitive validity (Weir, 2005) or interactional authenticity (Bachman & Palmer, 1996) of such tests.…”