How to Learn About Changes in Writing

To learn about changes in writing, a national Internet survey of both teachers and administrators was conducted. This survey focused on changes with regard to writing priorities, instruction, learning, and resources over the past three years in our nation's schools and school districts. The College Board contracted with Market Data Retrieval (MDR) to select national samples of teachers and administrators, and also to conduct the actual survey.

The target samples for the surveys were based on two populations:

• English/language arts teachers - those closest to writing in our nation's schools and whose students would be those most impacted by the SAT writing section given their proximity to the high school-to-college transition.

• School district administrators - those with broad curriculum responsibilities, knowledge, and involvement, which would include writing.

The samples were selected to represent all six College Board regions and included all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and can be found here https://customwriting.com/assignments-for-money. The samples were stratified on school metropolitan area and school size to ensure that all relevant subgroups were represented. Teachers from SAT states (states with high SAT volumes) were oversampled to ensure that a large proportion of those surveyed would be familiar with the SAT, and thus able to comment on its impact.

The total number of English language/arts teachers who completed the entire survey was 4,922. (There were 5,716 teachers who responded to at least one question on the survey.) This represents a response rate of 9 percent for full-survey completers and 10 percent for partial-survey completers. This sample size meets the threshold for ensuring a 95 percent confidence level that the teachers who completed the entire survey are representative of MDR's entire national database of senior high school English/language arts teachers (MDR, personal communication, November 2006).

Responding teachers represent schools in every state as well as the District of Columbia, and 3,340 different schools across the country. There were 2,464 schools with one teacher responding and 876 schools with more than one teacher responding. Most of the schools with multiple respondents (i.e., 599) had two teachers responding to the survey. The teacher respondent group is very similar to national distributions of all public and private schools by metropolitan area, diversity (by percent of minority enrollment), and size (by enrollment). For example, there is a 1 percentage point difference in urban school representation between our sample and national distributions, a 7 percentage point difference for suburban schools, and a 3 percentage point difference for high/ low minority schools (personal communication, National Education Data Resource Center, 2006).