SI, NSS, and ESS: Hand-coded Analyses

You have the option of hand-coding your transcripts to mark features of the language which are not captured by the standard SALT analyses. The followiing hand-coded analyses have been applied to selected samples stored in the SALT reference databases.

Subordination Index (SI)

The Subordination Index is a measure of syntactic complexity which produces a ratio of the total number of clauses (main and subordinate clauses) to the number of utterances (Loban, 1963, Strong, 1998, Hughes, et. al, 1997). A clause, whether it is main or subordinate, is a statement containing both a subject and a predicate. Grammatically, a subject is a noun phrase and a predicate is a verb phrase. Main clauses can stand by themselves. Subordinate clauses depend on the main clause to make sense. They are embedded within an utterance as noun, adjective or adverbial clauses.

Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS)

The Narrative Scoring Scheme is an assessment tool that provides an index of the student's ability to produce a coherent narrative. It was developed to create a more objective narrative structure scoring system and is based on an earlier version, Rubric for Completing a Story Grammar Analysis, developed by the Madison Metropolitan School District SALT working group, 1998, following the work of Stein and Glenn, 1979; 1982. This scoring procedure combines many of the abstract categories of Story Grammar, adding features of cohesion, connecting events, rationale for characters' behavior and referencing. Each of the scoring categories has explicit examples to establish scoring criteria, reducing the abstractness of the story grammar categories.

Expository Scoring Scheme (ESS)

The Expository Scoring Scheme assesses the structure of expository language, a critical language skill in secondary curriculum, using a scoring rubric consisting of the essential characteristics of a coherent expository. These characteristics include: 1) object, 2) preparations, 3) start, 4) course of play, 5) rules, 6) scoring, 7) duration, 8) strategies, 9) terminology, and 10) cohesion.

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