Journal of Writing Assessment

This annotated bibliography focuses on issues surrounding minorities and writing assessment, including issues associated with various ethnic groups as well as those issues associated with gender studies and with minorities in special education. In addition to reporting on minorities and testing consequences, several selections make recommendations for revising or constructing testing instruments to address some of the special issues minorities face with classroom and large-scale assessments. Several selections also pose important questions that classroom instructors, school administrators, and writing assessment specialists might ask before conducting assessments that involve minority students. Over the past 30 years, studies of SAT, ACT, and other high-stakes tests report that test scores continue to lag behind for certain minority groups. Several selections that we annotate below offer reasons for these differences and fresh insights and analyses into trends for minority test scores.