Into the Sound and the Fury, Yet Again: The Assessment Strand
How do we keep the adventurousness and risk-taking found in students' electronic writing alive?
How do we develop systematic methods of assessment and evaluation that respond to institutional needs?
Beginning with the online assessment strand and proceeding in the papers presented at Muncie these questions were asked again and again. The formulations of these questions reflected local differences, yet they also highlighted a growing national concern with using information technologies to assess student learning and record performances. How to evaluate the application of acquired knowledge about writing and about composing depended not only on computer-mediated writing environments but also on the constraints and needs of participants' institutions.
- "Developing a University-Wide Electronic Portfolio System for Teacher Education," Laurie Mullen, Bill Bauer, and Web Newbold
The work of Laurie Mullen, Bill Bauer and Web Newbold at Ball State University demonstrates one of the ways in which portfolio-based assessment may be adapted to electronic environments. Their concern with building writing assessment over time and across disciplines emphasizes the integration of computer-mediated communication not only in composition studies but also across the curriculum.
- "Gauging the Value of Online Grade Posting: An Inquiry into Full Disclosure," Michael Knievel
By examining the use of TOPIC at Texas Tech, Michael Knievel suggests some of the difficulties and challenges composition instructors face as new systematic databases for assessment and course management are developed.
- "Accountable Assessment in the Age of Digital Labor," M. Glaros
Glaros's quick look at assessment and digital labor brings forward the complexity of assessing student work.
As writing teachers and writing program administrators many members of the computers and writing community are constantly involved with these issues. What the assessment strand showed was some clever and innovative ways of balancing the student creativity and play we associate with the best electronic writing spaces AND the desire of colleges and universities as institutions of higher learning for definable standards and rubrics with which to judge students' academic progress.
In some ways, we are speaking of the tensions of a self-organizing system here…. The edges want to spin out, to play, to exist beyond, elsewhere….And there is innovation…. But technology also moves into systematic practice…. into an organized curriculum that maps student progress…. a place where those maps are passed from on instructor to another…. from one institution to another….
By returning to the logs from the asynchronous assessment strand from Computers and Writing Online, we can reclaim some of the discussions involving MOOs and writing assessment. The issues that came to the foreground in the online session demonstrate the difficulties of assessing student writing in innovative electronic spaces. What do we do when student writing escapes the forms, the rubrics, the methods we have developed for grading, judging and ranking student compositions? By ending where we began, we not only make a Joycean circle – James not Michael in that reference ;-) – but we also leave open the question of how – or if – writing assessment can systemically adapt/incorporate/acknowledge the most innovative aspects of student work.
The sad truth may be that systems of writing assessment are opposed to innovation, to creativity, to sparks within student writing.
And yet, a tail end, a tag, a nagging suspicion suggests that writing assessment could be otherwise, could be student-centered and an innovative tool for curriculum change. If we could just name it, just develop it. The beginnings of such systems might look something like the systems sketched out above, or something like the Online Learning Record developed by Peg Syverson at the University of Texas, or something like something none of us has thought of quite yet, beyond, elsewhere, not yet written….
Kathleen Blake Yancey
Carl Whithaus