Abstract

To better understand the writing skills of juvenile offenders and the components of their writing abilities, this study explored extant data from six measures of adolescents’ writing skills administered upon their entrance into a juvenile justice facility. Overall, the 235 students (ages 13–16; Grades 5–11) exhibited low scores on all writing measures, but there was a wide range in their performance with some students scoring at or near ceiling. A confirmatory factor analysis supported our hypothesis of a two-factor structure consisting of sentence-level and discourse-level skills. We compared the fit of three alternative models: a one-factor model, a higher-order model, and a bifactor model. None of the alternative models was superior to the two-factor model. These factors provide empirical support for certain aspects of traditional writing models and suggest a framework for efficiently assessing students to inform instruction.

摘要

为了更好地了解少年犯的写作技巧及其写作能力的组成部分，本研究从青少年进入少年司法机构后对六种衡量青少年写作技巧的现有数据进行了探索。总体而言，这235名学生（13至16岁； 5至11年级）的所有笔试成绩均很低，但他们的表现范围很广，有些学生的得分在或接近最高分数。验证性因素分析支持了我们的由句子水平和话语水平技能组成的两因素结构假说。我们比较了三种替代模型的拟合：单因素模型，高阶模型和双因素模型。没有任何一种替代模型优于两因素模型。