Two Concerns Repeat Over and Over Again:

  1. a strong desire to apply the knowledge within Assessing the Portfolio to/with/against the assessment contexts we encounter as writing teachers
  2. questions about the intended audience of this work.

Although we provide a chapter by chapter summary of Assessing the Portfolio, we believe that some of the important work of our review gets done in the linked commentaries about the actual uses of writing assessment tools (portfolio and otherwise) at CUNY and Ball State University. We are also struck by a tension in Hamp-Lyons and Condon's work between theorizing assessment and attempts to reach a broader audience. That is, there is an attempt within Assessing the Portfolio to introduce portfolio assessment to a wider audience while at the same time calling for a deeper, more reflective, more theorizied practice. These two tensions are rough edges, places where our review is anything but neat and organized. They are also tensions within Assessing the Portfolio, and, we believe, within the community of college writing teachers and assessment experts.

In fact, the tension between seems to be a unified tension--two sides of the same coin, a Mobius strip of sorts--that filters throughout discussions of writing assessment today.

Throughout this review, our voices mix and mingle with each other's words as well as with Hamp-Lyons and Condon's text. Quotation marks are used to indicate directe quotes from the text. We were each responsible for presenting a chapter summary and beginning discussion on that chapter. The person responsible for beginning the work on a chapter is indicated below; however, the comments linked to that chapter summary were generated in email discussions--and we have decided that we will do a better job of capturing the collaborative feel of this review without identifying individual responses. Responses are oftentimes purposefully short, concise, and to the point. They are purposefully contextual.