Large scale evaluations increasingly have become employed to summatively report on the status of students' writing and compositional skills at the district and state level. Often, however, students with learning disabilities or those receiving specialized educational services (i.e., Chapter 1 students) are not included or scores not summarized. This study describes initial validation data for several writing measures (both qualitative and quantitative) that can be used with the full range of students. We focused on four minimal measurement criteria: (a) consistent administration and scoring; (b) discrimination among students in different instructional or skill groups and grades; (c) at least low- moderate relation to other accepted assessment methods; and (d) score improvement by students over the course of a year. These findings are reported on different quantitative (objective, countable measures of performance) and qualitative (subjective, inferential judgments) aspects of writing for students from third, fourth, and fifth grade.
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