4/29 - Theories of Assessment

"The essence of reliability findings from the last two decades of research is that no single essay test will yield highly reliable results, no matter how careful the testing and scoring apparatus. If the essay test is to be used for important or irreversible decisions about students, a minimum of two separate writing samples must be obtained- or some other kind of measurement must be combined with the single writing score." (White 41)

"Directed self-placement is no panacea. It does not address the problem of how to teach, how to bring students in from the margins, or how to deal with all of the politics of institutional change. Soliday, Grego and Thompson, Bartholomae and others address many of these concerns that would take us far beyond the limited scope of placement alternatives. But our placement alternative does lay the ground work for much that these authors recommend." (Royer and Gilles 70)

LINKS

• The Council of Writing Program Administrators: http://www.wpacouncil.org/
• Digital book, Writing Program Administration by Susan McLeod http://wac.colostate.edu/books/mcleod_wpa/

READINGS
Huot, Brian. “The Literature of Direct Writing Assessment: Major Concerns and Prevailing Trends.” (1990)

• Direct vs. indirect assessment of writing
• Three types of direct assessment: primary trait, analytic, holistic, (portfolio)
• Topic development and task selection
• Text and writing quality
• Influences on rater judgement of writing quality

Royer, Daniel J., and Roger Gilles. “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation.” (1998)

• What are traditional methods/measures for placing students in firstyear writing courses?
• What are some of the problems with traditional methods?
• What are the reasons given for directed self-placment?

White, Edward M. “An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay Test.” (1995)

• Multiple-choice vs. essay vs. portfolio
• What the advantages of the timed essay assessment measure? What are its limitations?
• Validity, reliability, cost-effectiveness 

White, Edward M. “The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2.” (2005)

• What are the advantages of portfolios?
• What is the main problem with portfolios?
• What are key components to "phase 2" scoring of writing portfolios?

4/22 - Critical and Cultural Studies Pedagogy

"All educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator's part. This stance in turn implies--sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly--an interpretation of man and the world. It could not be otherwise." (Freire 616)

"Overall, this problematic study of "work" offers one means to engage students in an extraordinary reperception of something very ordinary. It not only develops literacy skills and consciousness relevant to the problem theme, but it also validates students psychologically, because the exercise is based on their experience and their language resources." (Shor 120)

"...we are ethically bound by students' own aims, even if those aims seem uncomfortably close to elite values. Our distrust of such values does not permit us to tell students what they "really" want, or should want. We are very limited, I think, in how far we can set ourselves up as ends-experts. The only thing we are certainly justified in imposing on students is our judgment of means: Here, in my expert opinion, is the best way to learn this thing that you and I have agreed should be taught." (Smith 317)

Freire, Paulo. “The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom and Education and ConscientizaÇão.”

• Literacy as disease metaphor
• Critical consciousness

Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.”

• Ideology: what is real, what is good, what is possible
• What is the goal of a critical pedagogy?

Shor, Ira. “Monday Morning Fever: Critical Literacy and the Generative Theme of “Work.”

• literacy instruction vs. writing instruction
• What classroom techniques does Shor discuss?

Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.”

• What are the causes of the "cultural left suddenly claiming writing courses as their territory"?
• What are the shortcomings of critical pedagogy?
• What alternatives does Hairston propose? 

Smith, Jeff. “Students' Goals, Gatekeeping, and Some Questions of Ethics.”

• Comp studies' "Standard Model": "means-ends equivalence," "ethic of direct enactment"
• Universities and professions as "intentional communities"
• Teachers' ethical obligations: to students, to society

4/15 - Theories of Pedagogy

"...in teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it. Yet many teachers (and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely mechanical skill, important only because it serves students in getting them through school and in advancing them in their professions. This essay will argue that writing teachers are perforce given a responsibility that far exceeds this merely instrumental task." (Berlin 766) 

"...ours is a truth-telling course; it forefronts the field's current labor practices and requires that we ask how FYC students are currently being served by writing instructors who couldn't teach a writing studies pedagogy. Our field's current labor practices reinforce cultural misconceptions that anyone can teach writing because there is nothing special to know about it." (Downs and Wardle 575)

Hillocks, George. "What Works in Teaching Composition." (1985)

• Duration of treatment
• Mode of instruction: Presentational, Natural Process, Individualized, Environmental
• Focus of instruction: Grammar, Sentence Combining, Models, Using Criteria, Inquiry, Free Writing

Berlin, James. “Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories.” College English 44.8 (1982): 765-77.

• Epistemology = what is knowable
• Major pedagogical theories: Neo-Aristotelian, Positivist or Current-Traditional, Neo-Platonic or Expressionist, Epistemic Rhetoric

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Exercise.” Villanueva 97-126. (2002)

• Rejection of mastery
• Post-process assumptions: writing is public, writing is interpretive, writing is situated

Fulkerson, Richard. “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” CCC 56 (2005): 654-87.

• Fulkerson's metatheory of pedagogy: axiology, process, pedagogy, epistemology 
• Three major approaches to teaching of composition: critical/cultural studies [CCS], expressivism, and procedural rhctoric

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” (2007)

• Rationale, pedagogy, challenges, benefits
• How would Fulkerson classify this course?

4/8 - Computers and Writing

"The gap between the manuscript and the printed page is closing. Through the technology, first through the development of the desktop publishing software and now, increasingly, through the standard word-processing package, the writer is entering an era where the published page is more directly under her or his control. This innovation has profound implications for writers, for writing, and the teaching of writing with computers, and for theories of electronic writing. Thus, weighing the consequencesof "taking control of the page" needs to be placed on our agenda for the nineties." (Sullivan 44)

"Despite these limitations, our project indicates that combining synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication did help our students improve as writers. Frequent contact with an actual audience, frequent practice in writing, and a more enjoyable writing environment helped students become more competent, comfortable writers....If one of the purposes of education is to help students become not only more complex thinkers and writers, but also more tolerant, accepting people, computer-mediated exchanges can be used to foster that humanistic goal." (Harris and Wambeam 370)

Sullivan, Patricia. “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing.” Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questions for the 1990s. Eds. Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher. NCTE, 1991. 43-64.

• What was the "problem" with computers and writing research circa 1980s, early 1990s? 
• What are ways that desktop publishing affects theories of the writing process? 
• What does Sullivan propose as possible explanatory theories for electronic writing?  

Harris, Leslie D., and Cynthia Wambeam. “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition 13 (1996): 353-371.

• What were the goals of their "Internet based [first year composition] discourse community"?
• What pedagogical methods were used to achieve this community?
• What research methods were used to assess the pilot?

Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson. “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian.” Computers and Composition 19 (December 2002): 453-70.

• MSGC reinforces current-traditional practice, assumptions
• MSGC inhibits writing process (i.e., novice writers too focused on surface-level corrections)
• Writing teachers should be aware of role of grammar checkers, computer tools on writing process, development of writing process

Mueller, Derek N. “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 26 (2009) 240–50.

• What is "digital underlife," which is based on Robert Brooke's (1988) "Underlife in the Writing Classroom"?
• What recomendations does Mueller offer for "enriching our understanding of digital underlife"?

OPTIONAL

• Sullivan, Laura L. “Wired Women Writing: Towards a Feminist Theorization of Hypertext.”
• Grabill, Jeffrey T. “On Divides and Interfaces: Access, Class, and Computers.”
• Slattery, Shaun. “Un-distributing Work through Writing: How Technical Writers Manage Texts in Complex Information Environments.”
• Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Understanding ‘Internet Plagiarism.’”
• Amy Diehl, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and William Hart-Davidson. “Grassroots: Supporting the Knowledge Work of Everyday Life.”
• Purdy, James P. “Anxiety and the Archive: Understanding Plagiarism Detection Services as Digital Archives.”