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(RE)ARTICULATING WRITING ASSESSMENT FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................ix1 (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment..................................12 Writing Assessment as a Field of Study...............................213 Assessing, Grading, Testing and Teaching Writing.....................594 Toward a New Theory for Writing Assessment...........................815 Reading Like a Teacher...............................................1096 Writing Assessment as Technology and Research........................1377 Writing Assessment Practice..........................................165Notes...................................................................192References..............................................................195Index...................................................................213About the Author........................................................217

Chapter One

Naming this book has been quite an adventure. When the idea for its title and shape first came to mind, I originally thought to call it Reclaiming Assessment for the Teaching of Writing. Of course, as I thought through the title and reexamined the idea, I realized that to reclaim something meant that it had to be claimed in the first place. Unfortunately, writing assessment has never been claimed as a part of the teaching of writing. As far back as 1840, writing assessment was hailed as a better technology (chapter six contains a discussion of writing assessment as technology) for assessing student knowledge (Witte, Trashel, and Walters 1986). The use of essay placement exams at Harvard and other prestigious institutions in the nineteenth century was justified in response to the growing perception that students were under-prepared for the rigors of university study. This notion of assessment as something done because of a deficit in student training or teacher responsibility is still with us in the plethora of accountability programs at the state level for public schools and in the recent national assessment programs advocated by the George W. Bush administration and adopted by Congress. Throughout the twentieth century, writing assessment became the tool of administrators and politicians who wished to maintain an efficient and accountable educational bureaucracy (Williamson 1994). The literature about classroom assessment was limited to an irregular series of volumes on grading student writing (see Judine 1965, for an example). At any rate, it would be inaccurate for me to advocate the re-claiming of writing assessment, when in fact it has yet to be claimed for the teaching of writing.

RE-IMAGINING ASSESSMENT

Although I contend that writing assessment has yet to be claimed for teaching writing, I have also come to challenge the whole notion of claiming assessment at all. Probably my dissatisfaction comes from the association of claiming with the concept of the stakeholder, a concept I discuss in more detail in chapters two and seven. Although I recognize that assessment must be a multi-disciplinary enterprise, something that should never be driven completely by the beliefs and assumptions of any single group, I don't believe that all stakeholders should have equal claim, since those closest to teaching and learning, like students and teachers, need to have the most input about writing assessment and all important teaching decisions. If assessment is to be used as a positive force in the teaching of writing, then it makes sense that those with the most knowledge and training be those who make the most important decisions about student assessment. Using writing assessment to promote teaching is one of the most crucial messages in this book.

Once I rejected the idea of reclaiming assessment, for awhile I renamed the volume Re-Imagining Assessment for the Teaching of Writing, because I now realized that the assessment of writing had never been central to its teaching and that claiming was a problematic term for many reasons. Because this volume is an ambitious work that clearly extends beyond simply staking out a claim for teachers to assessment, I thought the idea of re-imagining would work because it seemed grander, bigger, more in keeping with the ambitious nature of my purpose. As I began to work on the volume, however, "re-imagine" seemed too grand, too big, too abstract. And, of course one could argue that we had never imagined assessment for the teaching of writing. In a response to an earlier, shorter version of chapter four published in College Composition and Communication, Alan Purves (1996) had objected to my use of the term "theory," as being too big and abstract since he thought what I had constructed was something practical, important and useful, but not theoretical. My concern with theory is that it can be construed as distinct from practice, and my intent in this book is to blur rather than emphasize any distinctions between theory and practice. As I detail in chapter seven, I was flattered by what he had to say, even if I didn't completely agree with him. On the other hand, I decided "re-imagine" was too big, since what I propose throughout this volume is less grand and more a reasoned response to the pressures, pit-falls and potential benefits from the assessment of student writing. My ideas that writing assessment can become a more unified field with a central focus (chapter two), that grading, testing and assessing student writing are separate acts incorrectly lumped together and that makes us miss the importance of assessment for the teaching of writing (chapter three), that all assessment practice contains theoretical implications (chapter four), that responding to student writing should focus more on the way we read student work and write back to them (chapter five), that assessment has been developed as a technology and can benefit greatly from being revised as research (chapter six), and that writing assessment can never be understood outside of its practical applications (chapter seven) are less a re-imagining than they are a way of seeing something old and familiar as something new and novel. It is in this spirit that I came to call this volume (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. I do think that the individual chapters I mention above and about which I will elaborate more fully can add up to a new understanding of writing assessment. My purpose in writing this volume was to look at the various ways in which assessment is currently constructed and to articulate a new identity for writing assessment scholars and scholarship.

(RE) ARTICULATION

Before I outline the basic tenets that guide this volume, its scope, what the reader can expect throughout and how the various chapters work toward its overall purpose, it is important to talk about what I mean by (re)articulating writing assessment and even what I mean by the term "assessment"-what it is I hope to explain about assessment's connection to teaching and learning, why in some ways I think we need to reframe assessment for its pedagogical value, and why I think writing assessment has never been fully connected to teaching. I chose "articulation" as the what I wanted to do for assessment in this volume because it describes a kind of attention assessment needs but has never received. We need to talk about assessment in new ways, to recognize how...