Jessica’s Comments (group member since Jan 10, 2013)

Jessica’s comments from the Composition and Rhetoric group.

John wrote: "Let me start off by saying that about a year or so ago I was very critical of the digital humanities and the focus on new media, digital technology...etc. in comp. I was (and still am) worried abou..."

Hey, how did it go to have students choose their own approaches to their assignments?

Mya, I agree how "it would be interesting to see various DSP surveys tested on different populations." I'm curious about the dissonance that can occur with DSP when students are confident in their writing and literacy abilities but their teachers disagree.*

Some critiques I've read about DSP raise the question of fairness in having students make the decision on where to begin their writing career. Doing so certainly invites students to become more active participants. But what does it mean when compositionists can't agree on the best (most ethical, valid, viable, successful, etc.) method of placement, despite all our training and research?

And what does it mean when students who choose to be in a basic writing course realize the labeling repercussions that follow them throughout their academic career? What about multilingual students who would like additional support in their writing classes, but reject a non-mainstream course for other reasons?

*As Gita DasBender discusses in "Assessing Generation 1.5 Learners: The Revelations of Directed Self-Placement" in Writing Assessment in the 21st Century.

Thank you, Asao! A Q&A session would be wonderful. Perhaps you, John, and I can schedule something.

Cheers,
Jessica

John, I think you bring up an important point. Just because we advocate for assessments sensitive to local settings doesn't mean they're foolproof. A good example of this is a university or university system that designs a multiple choice test of grammar usage to measure students' writing ability... The quote you point to is actually central to my dissertation on placement practices!

It's easy to blame outside organizations for designing something unfair. I might argue that the current emphasis to design rhetorically-sensitive assessments demands _more_ from instructors and administrators, to ensure their methods and curricula are contextually sensitive, carefully constructed, and inclusive (vs discriminatory) -- for both legal and ethical reasons.

I'm a PhD candidate at UW-Milwaukee, working on my dissertation about placement practices at urban-serving, midwestern universities. My research interests include composition pedagogy, multilingual writing, writing assessment, post-colonial theories, and working-class theories. I teach FYC, ESL, and writing studies classes. Cheers!

Condon claims assessments ought to "be grounded in the various locations in which students learn" and "need to provide ways for students of all kinds to demonstrate what they have learned" (ix).

In their Introduction, Inoue and Poe discuss Murphy's view of cultural validity, wherein validity is how "students make sense of test items and test situations" (qtd on 4).

I'm curious about what others in this group think of these ideas of assessment, and about how such views might "make race visible," as the collection calls for.

Like Dale, I'm looking forward to re-reading _Race and Writing Assessment_. Asao Inoue and Mya Poe are two of the important "newer" voices within assessment and I think they're doing great work.

Rich Haswell recently reviewed the book for the _Journal of Writing Assessment_: http://jwareadinglist.blogspot.com/20...