Mya’s Comments (group member since Apr 27, 2013)

Mya’s comments from the Composition and Rhetoric group.

Hi, Jessica,

You raise a number of important issues here:

1. How do students gauge their own writing abilities? And against what are they measuring? The issue is not "who is right" but on what constructs of writing are such decisions being made.

Deborah Crusan has also written on this topic.


2. If we use DSP, then we also have to be clear about the implications of certain choices. I know of one major institution where students are given the "choice" of basic writing but aren't told that it doesn't carry college credit or that there is no actual evidence that taking the course improves their performance in subsequent writing classes (just a lot of lore). That's unethical.


In the end, I think DSP has lots of potential and I like what's been done, but I want the research to be more refined to individual populations and attuned to shifting trends in FYC.

Your point about coming to terms with the U.S. identity of basic writing, which is also attached to our cultural discourses course race is a great point.

And what other ways can we support basic writers outside of classrooms and writing centers? This just came up in an interview. One of my participants, a fabulous Chinese student, asked me how she could work on her research writing skills over the summer (She's very good at timed writing, narrative, and textual analysis, but research writing is hard for her). Her question made me wonder how we might set-up a peer tutoring/sharing group for such students.

Hi, John
Good question!

John's question gets to the heart of one issue in race and writing assessment--whose perspective is recognized as normative. (It's also about "locus of control" in the old psychology sense.)

If you think about it, a single DSP question can be worded in lots of different ways:

"I am a good writer" (self)
"People say that I am a good writer" (external judgment)
"My school prepared me to be a good writer." (systemic judgment)
"People like me are good writers." (self identified with a group)

Each version of that question can also be wired positively or negatively. Each choice offers students different ways of thinking about their writing and reading practices AND may yield quite different results. Personally, I think it would be interesting to see various DSP surveys tested on different populations.