act writing promps

act writing promps

Exploring the Impact of ACT Writing Prompts on Student Performance

1. Introduction to ACT Writing Prompts

Students wishing to take the ACT exam have the option to take the ACT Writing Test as part of the exam. This portion of the exam, which requires the student to demonstrate critical reading and writing capabilities, is optional in nature. In order to address the higher education market’s need for critical thinking skills, the essay portion was introduced as an optional part of the exam in 2005. Results from successful completion of the requirements presented in the ACT Writing Section prompt are then sent to student-selected institutions of higher education upon the test taker’s request. Hence, this examination into the impact ACT Writing Test prompts have on test takers’ completion of the assembled papers is all the more relevant.

The mock college entrance exam known as the ACT is a tool used by thousands of high school students each year to gain admission to higher education institutions. In 2005, while continuing to produce the same results as it had for years before, the makers of the ACT exam made a substantial change to the format of the exam. A second section of the exam, focused solely on writing, was added. This essay portion of the exam was believed to bring ACT results more in line with the writing standards of higher education institutions by providing a measurement tool which was more in line with the professional writing expectations of higher education instructors.

2. Analyzing the Structure and Content of ACT Writing Prompts

Content of ACT Writing Prompts. The majority of the information in writing prompts is presented in a piece of persuasive writing that is meant to help influence the reader into holding a certain viewpoint or taking a particular action related to that topic. Topics covered in ACT writing prompts include controversial issues that are evaluated through writing. For instance, one of the recent prompts, as of the beginning of 2017, was on public health funding, which is an especially relevant topic for the developing discourse on public policy and health care funding. Other recent writing prompts included questions on the sense of anonymity afforded to individuals by technology, questions on the concept of living with nature, and questions on the role of intelligence.

There are four subdomains of writing: focus on the specific issue, critical thinking skills – analysts are able to think about what is being discussed and then evaluate the degree to which it makes sense, use of literacy devices, and commitment to one’s point of view. Students are also scored for ensuring that their essay takes on the appropriate tone and for expressing their thoughts by using varied sentence structures. These subdomains are assessed by raters employed by ACT.

Structure of ACT Writing Prompts. Each ACT writing prompt is an argumentative essay topic that typically includes three distinct perspectives on a specific issue. For example, the question may ask students to express their viewpoints on or responses to a distinctive quote, provide their reactions, support their views, and then evaluate the three provided perspectives. The question may conclude by addressing the implications of adopting students’ viewpoints. Though the question typically adheres to this structure, the number of premises can vary. For example, some ACT questions feature only two perspectives.

3. The Relationship Between ACT Writing Prompts and Student Performance

The fact that these statistically derived topics did not correspond to students’ self-generated topics does not necessarily mean that no common themes existed between those topics students generated and those generated by the computer routine. However, the fact that students created such a variety of topics—so many, in fact, that there was not much repetition in the list—does suggest that it is possible that students had a rather ambiguous understanding of what the writing task on the ACT was, and that there was not a distinctive pattern of topics in students’ choices. Although the fact that the five self-generated topics did have an above-chance occurrence in the larger pool of topics indicates that they were not randomly distributed across the larger pool, the fact that several of the most common self-generated topics were not addressed by any of the six computer-generated topics indicates that the computer-generated topics were not neighbored in this larger field, as if the two methods of topic generation were two maps of different cities’ downtown area with no safe or logical transportation roads from one downtown to the other.

4. Strategies for Effective Preparation and Response to ACT Writing Prompts

Several popular preparation resources are currently available to students who are seeking to maximize their writing ability for the ACT Writing Test, including the “3rd Edition Real ACT Prep Guide” by ACT, Inc. and the “Princeton Review Cracking the ACT” by Adam Robinson. One common theme that is found in these resources is to prepare students for the constraints of time by requiring students to complete a mock test under simulated test conditions. In fact, the Real ACT Prep Guide contains a practice test that students can complete under timed conditions, and provides two prompts for the Writing Test. Students complete the short essay and send their responses to ACT where they are scored, and the feedback is sent back to the student. Can we provide meaningful suggestions that will help students score higher? This chapter is focused on strategies that writing prompts are used not in isolation, but instead in the context of full prompts that contain multiple sections, including background information, multiple viewpoints, and task.

In recent years, the development of written essays that meaningfully address the prompts provided in many standardized testing programs has received an increasing amount of attention. For example, the long essay that is required as part of the SAT Reasoning Test has been widely debated for its utility in predicting college success. The first two years of data from that test format have been now collected and released by the College Board. And in April 2005, The College Board will administer an essay on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) for the first time. Research has suggested that providing writing instruction in an independent classroom context or including writing instruction in each content class is effective in improving the writing ability of students.

5. Conclusion and Future Research Directions

However, while our data contribute to understanding the impact of ACT writing prompts on student performance, they shed little light on precisely why longer writing prompts can hinder in this particular context. The multidimensional feature of our factorial treatment likely means that there are any number of reasons that the tone of ACT writing prompts could predict student performance on the ACT essay section. Future work seeking to verify the remaining hypotheses in this exploratory study could include a similarly large dataset that would allow for detailed modeling of interactions between prompt characteristics, prompt length, and student performance, or qualitative analysis of student responses to the writing prompts. If future research in this space could convincingly verify our remaining hypotheses, it might provide a framework structure for further research about how the ‘real-world’ conditions of test-writing influence student composition in general, with particular relevance for large-scale assessments required by policymakers.

Writing is a critical skill for today’s college students, and it is important for researchers, educators, and policymakers to understand the specific experiences for students facing writing situations in college. Our findings suggest that longer writing prompts predict worse performance only on the essay section of the ACT, and that it is not reversed that writing prompts can enhance student performance on the essay section of the ACT. Furthermore, our data indicate that the differences that we observe are unlikely to be driven by the relative complexity of the text or by the multivariate length of the prompt as a whole. We find, finally, that differences in prompt wording are associated with the distribution of scores on the essay component of the ACT.