Composition and Rhetoric discussion

I'm excited to read this.

It's an important book. I look forward to rereading it with the group.

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...

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.

An article in today's (April 4th) New York Times about automated essay assessment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/sci...

Is it possible for automated essay assessment to "be grounded in the various locations in which students learn" (Condon ix)? How does a computer program address difference in race, ethnicity, or culture when assessing writing?

After reading that NYT article, the specter of computers grading student essays is haunting me as I read the chapters in Race and Writing Assessment. It certainly makes me appreciate scholarship like R&WA even more.

The first Endnote to the Introduction--wherein Inoue and Poe note Chris Gallagher's counterargument to "local assessment"--really got me thinking. The endnote: "local assessments might not serve local needs and interest well. They may even be poorly constructed, unaligned (or misaligned) with curriculum and instruction, and even blatantly unfair and discriminatory" (11).

Jessica, this made me think differently about that quotation of Condon's. If assessments ought to "be grounded in the various locations in which students learn" (ix) that is, grounded in various local conditions, what happens when local assessments are, as Gallagher suggests sometimes "poorly constructed" or "discriminatory"?

A Mother Jones article notes that Louisiana voucher schools developed a local teaching/assessment program apart from normed Louisiana Dept. of Education standards. The curriculum included dinosaurs and humans existing together and "God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ." (http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marbl...).

Assessing content is a different ballgame than assessing writing, so perhaps that example doesn't fit. But when Condon writes "No nationally normed, multiple-choice test has ever helped a student learn anything" (viii) my gut agrees with him, but then I think about dinosaurs and humans hanging out.

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.

It seems like local assessment standards would be easier to revise--more like it's a local work in progress--than standards imposed from the outside that seem prepackaged and solidified.

I just finished Anne Herrington and Sarah Stanley's excellent "Criterion: Promoting the Standard," which answered many of my questions about the above-posted NYT article on automated essay assessment.

I especially liked this passage near the end of the essay: "...Criterion mirrors beliefs that some of us hold about a single appropriate standard of English, beliefs that are at odds with or own organization's position statements and scholarship on language, rhetoric, and composition. We should look at the mirror self-critically, then, for what it reflects about ourselves and our values" (60).

ETS often argues that scores from automated essay assessment programs closely align with human raters. That probably tells us more about our own practices than the reliability/validity of the assessment software. Herrington and Stanley are right to suggest that "we should look at the mirror self-critically."

Hi all,

First, thank you so much for reading our book. Mya and I thought, if you were interested, we'd love to have a Q&A about the book -- that is, if anyone is interested. Perhaps you've moved on from our book, but if not, we'd love to hear your input and discuss with you anything the book raised for you.

Again, many thanks for reading and discussing our book. I know I speak for Mya as well when I say we are deeply grateful for your careful and thoughtful discussion on the book.

Peace.

-- Asao B. Inoue

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

Cheers,
Jessica

Hi Jessica,

Would love to! We can do it any number of ways, asynchronously, by Twitter, or on this forum. It's up to you and the others. Whatever works best and will allow all who wish to participate.

peace.

-- Asao

I don't think this really counts as part of the Q&A since it's more of a ramble on my part and less of an organized question of any sort.

I just read Rachel Lewis Ketai's "Race, Remediation, and Readiness: Reassessing the 'Self' in Directed Self-Placement" and I was impressed by her revisions of the DSP brochures (found on the bottom of page 153) and think they do a great job emphasizing local context and a student's personal history in their self-placement.

But one revision troubles me a bit: "My high school classes did not prepare me to conduct research and use reliable sources in my writing" (153).

I guess I have conflicting ideas about it. I understand the revision takes up Bonilla-Silva's ideas on color-blind racism--specifically abstract liberalism-- to critique and revise the emphasis on the abstract self in the original language of the goal (original language: "I need to improve my research skills and learn how to use outsides sources in my writing"). I dig Ketai's approach.

But...does that revision erase any sense of "self"? Does it rob students of choice or agency in reflecting on their personal history?

Too much emphasis on the individual can erase racial inequalities and make it appear to be the student's fault, so, again, I like the revision...

But does the goal now position students in the old familiar banking relationship where education is merely a one-way street and students sit passively while the high school factory "prepares" them?

This is a whole lot of blather for one small goal. But look at the difference in another revision where Ketai emphasizes a more dynamic relationship between the student and the school: "My school and/or home gave me plenty of access to computers and the Internet, so I'm confident I can research, write, and revise college essays using the computer" (153).

Maybe what I'm saying is that in directed-self placement we wouldn't want to reinforce the idea that education is something that happens to students.

On a side note, I just added Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's book Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States to my personal reading list.

Hi John,

What a really good set of questions. Thank you for reading so carefully. I agree with your concerns and the questions your raise about treating a student only as a product of an educational system and as an agent that is manipulated into blaming herself or taking on the faults of the system by self-placing into a course (for whatever reason) are always -- in a broad sense -- tensions in any assessment. Don't you think? In one way, this is really the same Freirian problem that he asks his students to confront by "problematizing their existential situations," confronting the two realms that co-construct human agency and experience: the social (structural, like DSP systems) and the individual (the student making decisions based on personal reflection and knowledge of her history).

I love the way you say, "in directed-self placement we wouldn't want to reinforce the idea that education is something that happens to students." I agree in the ideal, but do you think this is the common experience of students? Does education happen to them? And if so, or if there is a tension between being educated by systems that are white and middle class and learning as a raced, gendered, and classed agency-filled experience of an individual, then how might a DSP process acknowledge these tensions? How does it still fulfill the goals set out for the program? How do we meet our students where they are when they come to the DSP process?

Great discussion! Thank John. I'm curious what others think.

P.S. Bonilla-Silva should be read by all educators. Good stuff!

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.

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.

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 Jessica,

I hope it's okay I chime in here. I'll second what Mya has said about the tensions in DSP. Then again, any writing assessment has such tensions, regardless of the potential course decisions or placements. At Fresno State, all choices give students university credit, and no choice is a "remedial" or "basic writing" course. In part, this is a CSU mandate. We do not remediate, which I agree with in letter, but not the spirit CSU's Chancellor's office mandated it. They say we doing because, essentially, that student must be prepared before they come to us. There are obvious problems with that. However, I do think that the stigma of remediation is often too much to overcome for many students, and affects their progress and self-efficacy. So advertising courses as not rememdial and using curricula that back up that advertising is essential to avoiding much of that stigma you mention when students choose one option over others.

But let me say something about another thing you and Mya mention, about choosing and essentially the validity of such choices by early students. I appreciate how Mya has put it in her response: "The issue is not 'who is right' but on what constructs of writing are such decisions being made." I'd add a nuance here. One construct that often gets too underplayed i such decisions like placement is non-cognitive dimensions of students, such as self-efficacy, happiness, a sense of agency, etc. In fact, I'd argue that most of the Framework of Success in Postsecondary Writing are non-cognitive in nature, not cognitive, such as are typical writing constructs. So in this way of thinking through the validity of a student's course self-placement, it seems reasonable to think that if she chooses a course and fails that course, she STILL may have made a highly valid choice if we understand validity of that choice as not simply determined by things like course grades or passing rates. Perhaps persistence is better, or her own level of happiness with the course choice she made, or her own sense of what she learned from making a choice that didn't equate to a passing grade. Lots to be learned in that scenario and I think often more than if she were placed by other means outside her own agency and choosing.

Nice discussion. Peace.

-- Asao

Thanks for the great discussion everyone.

Most welcome, John! I appreciate the read of the book!