ASSESSMENT OF PLANNING, TRANSLATING, AND REVISING IN JUNIOR-HIGH WRITERS

This article serves three functions: (a) to provide school psychologis ts with an overview of what is currently known about the cognitive ski lls in writing, (b) to report the results of a theory-driven experimen t that yielded means and standard deviations for planning, translating , and reviewing/revising which school psychologists could use in group screening or individual psychoeducational assessment, and (c) to revi ew the literature on interventions for deficits in cognitive processes related to writing. The importance of using gender norms in writing a ssessment is emphasized. Significant gender differences were found in planning, translating, and revising, but they disappeared for quality of translating and revising at the text level when number of words, an index of compositional fluency, was used as a covariate. Boys were in ferior to girls in compositional fluency (rate of producing text) hut not compositional quality (based on content and text organization).