PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)

A study was undertaken to determine the effects on essay scores of intermingling handwritten and woad- processed versions of student essays. A sample of 32 examinees, each of whom had produced both a handwritten and a word-processed essay, was drawn from a larger group who had participated in a pilot study of item types for The Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers (TM). Students ' original handwritten essays were converted to word-processed versions, and their original word-processed essays were converted to hand-written versions. In a preliminary study, essays were intermingled and rescored. Analyses revealed higher average scores for essays scored in the handwritten mode than for those scored as word-processed, regardless of how they were originally produced. Several hypotheses were advanced to explain the discrepancies batween scores on handwritten and word-processe