As youth increasingly access the public sphere and contribute to civic life through digital tools, scholars and educators are rethinking how civically engaged writing is taught, nurtured, and assessed. This article presents the conceptual underpinnings of the National Writing Project's Civically Engaged Writing Analysis Continuum (CEWAC), a new tool for assessing youth's civically engaged writing. It defines four attributes of civically engaged writing using qualitative analysis of expert interviews and literature: employs a public voice, advocates civic engagement or action, argues a position based on reasoning and evidence, and employs a structure to support a position. The article also presents reliability and validity evidence for CEWAC. The study finds that CEWAC has a moderate to high level of exact agreement and a high level of exact or adjacent agreement. Covariation analyses showed that, even with similar scoring patterns, CEWAC's attributes hold at least a moderate level of independence. This evidence, coupled with robust qualitative evidence around reliability and validity, establish CEWAC's strong technical properties. The findings suggest that CEWAC can be used both in research and in the classroom to make visible attributes of civically engaged writing often overlooked in traditional assessment frameworks.

Keywords: public writing, civic engagement, writing assessment, rubric, reliability

This study reports findings from a multisite cluster randomized controlled trial designed to validate and scale up an existing successful professional development program that uses a cognitive strategies approach to text-based analytical writing. The Pathway to Academic Success Project worked with partner districts affiliated with 4 National Writing Project (NWP) sites in southern California. Informed by a wide body of research on the efficacy of strategy instruction to enhance students’ academic literacy, the intervention aimed to help secondary school students, particularly Latinos and mainstreamed English learners, to develop the academic writing skills called for in the rigorous Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Two hundred thirty teachers from partner districts affiliated with the NWP sites were stratified by school and grade and then randomly assigned to the treatment or control group. Treatment teachers participated in 46 hrs of training and learned how to apply cognitive strategies by using an on-demand writing assessment to help students understand, interpret, and write analytical essays about nonfiction texts. Multilevel models revealed significant effects on a holistic measure of an on-demand writing assessment (d =.32) as well as on 4 analytic attributes: content (d =.31), structure (d =.29), fluency (d =.27), and conventions (d =.32). Four dimensions of scaling up—spread, reform ownership, depth, and sustainability—are also discussed.