Studying data from students placed into basic writing classes at the community college where he teaches, Adams was curious to learn about the effect of the classes. He found that students who were placed into basic writing courses but enrolled in first-year composition performed better than those who were placed into and took basic writing courses. Adams uses these findings to argue for the mainstreaming of basic writers.
Belanoff refutes four "myths" concerning writing assessment: that teachers of composition are aware of what they are testing for, know what they are actually testing, can agree on whether particular papers meet evaluation and assessment criteria once they have been established, and are able to create and apply an absolute (Platonic) standard to student writing. Belanoff assures readers that she does not advocate abolishing assessment and recognizes its necessity in the educational institution. However, she suggests that assessments need to be based on the "strengths of good teachers" (62). By working together to formulate a definition of "good" student writing, Belanoff feels that composition instructors will form a stronger and more cohesive community among themselves and find a way to eliminate the standardized test assessment model that is commonly used among educational institutions today.
This is an edited transcript of an online discussion among six City University of New York graduate students who covered theoretical and political issues behind the teaching of basic writing. Much of the discussion centers on students' desire for Standard English as access to power and the political and cultural repercussions of that desire. The graduate students also discuss the insufficiency of assessment, the activist role of the composition class and the composition teacher, the disjuncture between instruction in literature and composition, and the appropriate place of code-switching and transculturation in composition pedagogy.
Gleason argues that program evaluation is political and requires an examination of the social context. At the City College of New York, Gleason supervised a pilot program of thirty-seven sections of composition that included basic writing students. To evaluate the program, Gleason examined formative evaluations written by teachers and students, statistical analysis of student success (grades being the main variable), and the expert judgment of an outside observer. Policy at the college dictated that no basic writer could take core curriculum classes until they passed basic writing, but the college waived that policy for basic writers in the pilot sections that include first-year and mainstream basic writing students. Gleason found that students who first took basic writing and then took the core curriculum classes passed the core courses at higher rates than both pilot students and the general population. After three years of mainstreaming basic writers into standard composition classes, college administrators largely ignored the data that came from the pilot study. Instead, the institutional research office wanted to control distribution of the data and pushed Gleason to use more experimental methodologies. Hostility also developed, as the faculty council voted to require the passing of both basic writing and standard composition before students can enroll in core classes. In the future, various agents should be involved more directly in the execution and evaluation of projects such as this, and researchers should pay closer attention to context.
Harley and Cannon focus on the example of Mica, a nontraditional African American student at Saginaw Valley State University who failed a final portfolio assessment. The authors suggest that the student's failure was the project's failure, demonstrating clearly how the project's monolithic assessment practices could not respond appropriately to the writing strategies of diverse students. They theorize that teachers' criteria for assessing Mica's writing may have been insufficient and that their expectations about academic writing may have blinded them to the strengths in Mica's work. The authors mention a few features of Mica's writing that are insufficiently accounted for in the evaluation criteria: the presence of linguistic markers of Mica's Black English Vernacular dialect, her "strong emotive voice" (75), and her confident use of personal anecdotes. The authors suggest that we need to broaden our understanding of academic discourse to account for features like these, noting that such features are already apparent in the work of some mainstream academic writers.
Using holistic grading scales of student essays as his database, Haswell discusses the consistency of judgment of bad papers. One criterion he often used was the work done by workplace writers, who presumably had been chosen to write material for their companies because they were considered competent writers in their workplaces. Because such writers have a lean style both in classrooms and in the workplace, their abilities and disabilities are much easier to diagnose. Among the disabilities are causes that teachers often regard as behavioral (lack of confidence, motivation, confusion of context), but Haswell suggests that simplicity and wit can often be the better framework for building up a student's writing rather than tearing it down.
Hilgers argues that students become basic writers through assessment, most often through their scores on inappropriate tests such as the SAT, ACT, or the Nelson-Denny. Furthermore, these bad assessments drive the curriculum and the evaluation procedures in many basic writing classes. Viable assessment methods can be used to discover students' needs, such as those employed by Mina Shaughnessy, but these are not as cheap and easy as standardized, multiple-choice instruments. The Conference on College Composition and Communication Position Statement on Assessment can be used to ensure that better assessments are used to identify basic writers at the college level and to certify them as ready for "regular" composition. The reauthorization of Chapter I funds of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which supports educational remediation, offers additional hope that assessment will focus more on helping identify students' needs so that all students can achieve high standards.
Miraglia puts the traditional basic writing diagnostic essay into context, suggesting that the genre helps to situate writers in their own lived experience and to evaluate the student's writing characteristics. However, the prompts on which the diagnostic essay usually depends may elicit misleading data and results because they assume three questionable assumptions: masked intentions, in which the prompt's question is poorly designed; magical thinking, in which (after Janet Emig) it is assumed that the teacher can both diagnose and address the range of writing problems in a writing class; and assumptions of expertise, in which rhetorical expertise is assumed to rest with the teacher, not the student. Miraglia describes a new diagnostic essay model that emphasizes students' assessment of their own needs, which results in a rubric of attributes, concerns, and desired skills as articulated by the incoming basic writing student. Because the model is based on attention to rhetorical levels of content and form, with less emphasis on intimate personal revelation, the result is a more reliable map of discourse characteristics to help guide a student throughout the course.
Shor argues that the City University of New York burdens students with excessive assessments of their reading and writing proficiencies. Basic writers must pass the remedial composition course and a timed writing impromptu before they are permitted to register for regular composition. In some cases, students who fail the timed writing test violate policy and register for regular composition anyway. Such students, Shor writes, are "guilty of illegal literacy and unauthorized progress" (102) and are examples of resistance to the bureaucratic and oppressive nature of testing and remediation. This process is part of a conservative attempt to discourage success among the minority and working-class populations heavily represented in basic writing classes. A more democratic alternative, Shor writes, would involve mainstreaming basic writers and transforming first-year writing into "Critical Literacy across the Community." This new curriculum would consist of community service, field research, and ethnographic writing instead of drills in usage and mechanics and allegiance to academic discourse.
Stories shared among basic writing professionals seem to carry common themes: student access and success in the academic community, teachers' experiences, and training writing instructors. Singer argues that the need to revisit and to listen to our stories, whether they exhibit successes or generate questions or propose new programs, is essential if we are to understand the political and cultural impact of decisions made around basic writing. The article focuses on the story of one faculty member's reflections about marginalization. It describes a course created to bridge the isolated remedial courses to the freshman composition program without entirely mainstreaming the students. Singer explores multiple perceptions of language use, audience, collaboration, and belonging in the academic community; her twenty years experience of teaching, research, and service in a basic writing program at a large urban university; and the constant moving of the margins during that time.
Emphasizing that writing program administrators should respond to both local needs and to increasing demands from administrators (and legislatures) for sensible assessment procedures, this study reports on an evaluation of the developmental writing program at a midsize public university. A two-year study within the writing program generated an assessment model whereby essays written for placement were compared to essays the same students wrote at the end of a semester. Using the model, the author demonstrates that statistically significant gain scores (p < .01) are achieved for the writing program based on the writing scores at these two times (placement essay compared to the writing produced after one semester of instruction in developmental writing). The study provides one method for establishing a baseline measure in a writing program, and it supports a systematic assessment of writing that can be used to link developmental writing courses to the regular, first-year English classes. The author notes that "while campuses obviously differ, the model may prove useful for assessment in a variety of settings" (6).
White argues that the movement in the 1990s to abolish the first-year composition requirement masks a dangerous elitism that is trying to prevent opportunities for the poor, for racial minorities, and for students who come to the university underprepared for its writing requirements. This elitism stems from budget cuts that have led to raised tuition and restricted enrollments, turning writing into a gate-keeping "wing of the admissions office" (76). To counter what he sees as an elitist abolitionist movement, White uses data from two sets of studies—one of "1978 First-Time Freshmen" in the California State University system and one from New Jersey postsecondary institutions conducted in 1988, 1991, and 1992—to suggest that effective placement programs and supportive basic writing programs will help to retain minority and underprepared students who might otherwise leave the university. While there are various reasons for students to leave school at various points in their studies, White argues that well-supported placement and basic writing programs will keep basic writers in school. At the very least, he hopes such studies will shed some light on the social biases he sees behind the abolitionist movement of the last decade.
See: Sharon Crowley, "Response to Edward M. White's 'The Importance of Placement and Basic Studies'" [279]
See: Edward M. White, "Revisiting the Importance of Placement and Basic Studies: Evidence of Success" [266]
White examines fundamental issues behind different methods of writing assessment, dividing its discussion into two parts. In the first part, White discusses the two paradigms of writing instruction, product and process, by teasing out the pedagogical and political implications behind each. He concludes that the product approach and its concomitant means of assessment disrupt the development of writers' attitudes toward writing as discovery and as a valuable exercise. The second, much briefer section lists the advantages and disadvantages of the three basic writing assessment methods, multiple-choice usage tests, essay tests, and portfolios, concluding that portfolios best measure writing as process. The discussion of portfolio assessment is admittedly limited, given the date of the article. Nonetheless, White provides a lucid summary of the principles that underlie writing assessment methodology.
A new elitism and its (however unintended) theorists, the new abolitionists, seek to abandon the required freshman composition course and the placement tests that help students succeed in it and in college. This essay is a follow-up to White's "The Importance of Placement and Basic Studies" [264]. As the data show, a placement program, followed by a careful instructional program, allows many students who would otherwise leave school to continue successfully in the university.
In 1983, three professors at the City University of New York did a national survey in which they discovered that 97 percent of the 1,269 responding institutions assess entering students. The assessments were often used to determine admission, program acceptance, and placement; students' persistence often was affected by them. Wiener asks how educators know if assessment tests measure what they are supposed to measure and if basic writing assessment programs are working. Thus, Wiener and two colleagues, in association with the National Testing Program in Writing, followed up on this study with another designed to find out what types of instruments were being employed. Their study revealed resistance by many postsecondary institutions to using nationally developed standardized tests; instead, many institutions employ instruments that are not evaluated for reliability, validity, or even relationship to current curricula. Unfortunately, those institutions that did employ nationally developed tests are using the SAT or ACT incorrectly since these tests are designed to measure potential college success and create a stratification among students and are not intended to evaluate skill levels. In response to the ongoing institutional desire for assessment, Wiener and his colleagues developed the College Assessment Evaluation Program, a self-assessment program, and trained facilitators to use it. The CAPE allows institutions to engage in self-evaluation and to design instruments that relate to their particular curricula.
Instructors do not like writing assessment because it is often not an indicator of student writing ability. Based on a program developed by Wolcott and a colleague, Wolcott advocates a more accurate picture of student assessment that includes pre- and postimpromptu essays, a multiple-choice editing test, and portfolio assessment. After assessing this program, Wolcott found that "multiple sources of data [are] preferable to a single data source" (67). Balancing writing assessments with portfolio assessment gave a more comprehensive picture of student writing ability. Through multifaceted program evaluation, instructors are more accountable to themselves, the program, and basic writers.