THE EFFECTS OF TASK CHOICE ON THE QUALITY OF WRITING OBTAINED IN A STATEWIDE ASSESSMENT

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of presenting a c hoice of writing tasks on the quality of essays produced by 11th-grade students. The effects of task choice were examined for interactions w ith the gender and race of students. Fifteen writing tasks, designed t o elicit persuasive essays, were administered to 34,200 students in Ge orgia. Approximately half the students received an assigned task, wher eas the other half were presented a choice of two tasks. A multivariat e analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted using four domain scores as the dependent variables assessing writing quality and four indepen dent variables (gender, race, writing tasks, and choice condition). Th e student characteristics of gender and race and the writing task vari able had a significant effect in the MANOVA and all four univariate an alyses. Female students wrote essays of higher quality than male stude nts and White students wrote essays of higher quality than Black stude nts. The choice condition had no substantive effect on the quality of essays. The writing task variable had a significant interaction with t he other independent variables.