Writing assessments often make use of analytic rating scales to describe the criteria for different performance levels. However, the use of such rating scales requires a level of interpretation by raters and if several raters are involved, the reliability of examinee scores can be significantly affected (Engelhard, 1992; McNamara 1996). Variability between raters is partly managed by rater trai...

Studies that have addressed questions concerning when framing effects are likely to occur have produced mixed results. In this article we examine how differences in personality factors influence a group–based framing task. Specifically, when high collective importance individuals evaluated a framing task involving their group no framing effects were observed. Different results were obtained for...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by analytic/reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which depends mainly on readers’ writing rather than reading experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). Here we examined whether simplified and traditional Chinese readers process characters differently in terms of holistic processing. When processing characters that are distinctive ...