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Fear and Trembling? Shock and Awe? Which set of statements best describes the emotions surrounding the assessment of writing ability in educational settings? This book - the first historical study of its kind - begins with Harvard University's 1874 requirement that first-year student applicants submit a short composition as part of the admissions process; the book concludes with the College Board's 2005 requirement for an essay to be submitted as part of the new SAT(R) Reasoning Test. Intended for teachers who must prepare students to submit their writing for formal assessment, administrators who must make critical decisions based on test scores, and policy makers who must allocate resources based on evaluation systems, On a Scale provides a much-needed historical and conceptual background to questions arising from national attention to student writing ability.
The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias. This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of criti...
Focusing on overt and covert violence and bringing attention to the many ways violence inflects and infects the teaching, administration, and scholarship of composition, Violence in the Work of Composition examines both forms of violence and the reciprocal relationships uniting them across the discipline. Addressing a range of spaces, the collection features chapters on classroom practices, writing centers, and writing program administration, examining the complicated ways writing instruction is interwoven with violence, as well as the equally complicated ways writing teachers may recognize and resist the presence and influence of violence in their work. This book provides a focused, nuanced...
Failing Sideways is an innovative and fresh approach to assessment that intersects writing studies, educational measurement, and queer rhetorics. While valuing and representing the research, theory, and practice of assessment, authors Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks demonstrate the ways that students, teachers, and other interested parties can find joy and justice in the work of assessment. A failure-oriented assessment model unsettles some of the most common practices, like rubrics and portfolios, and challenges many deeply held assumptions about validity and reliability in order to ask what could happen if assessment was oriented toward possibility and poten...
Pivotal Strategies examines the rhetorical contexts and motivations that determine how and why people choose writing studies as a discipline, especially as the field begins to take more seriously an antiracist imperative that requires more conscious listening and promotion of work from scholars representing traditionally underrepresented voices. Because undergraduate degrees in writing studies are relatively new, claiming the discipline has required reinvention and revision at personal and professional levels far different than any other discipline. Suspicions about the viability of the discipline linger in many departments and universities, as well as outside the academy, leading writing st...
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book describes the extensive contributions made toward the advancement of human assessment by scientists from one of the world’s leading research institutions, Educational Testing Service. The book’s four major sections detail research and development in measurement and statistics, education policy analysis and evaluation, scientific psychology, and validity. Many of the developments presented have become de-facto standards in educational and psychological measurement, including in item response theory (IRT), linking and equating, differential item functioning (DIF), and educational surveys like the National Assessment of ...
Catastrophic storms, searing heat waves, crumbling waterfronts, warming oceans, air-fouling forest fires and mass extinction have become facts of life. Under these conditions, it is difficult to imagine that the global industrial civilization will continue in its present form. This requires us to reconsider the subject of ecocomposition from a new perspective: “What does it mean to teach college writing in the face of this sobering reality?” The introduction reviews the history of ecocomposition and reframes it in light of the apocalyptic turn in climate discourse over the last quarter century as well as the role that ecocomposition theory can play in framing these discussions. Teaching ...
Touching on topics including conservation efforts in specific locales; social and political constructions of rhetorical place and space; town planning and zoning issues; and rhetorics of environmental remediation and sustainability, this collection provides rhetoricians and environmentalists a window into the discourse on sustainability.
Documents how Asian/Asian American teacher-scholars have emerged within and contributed to a number of areas in rhetoric and composition, as well as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in diverse and substantial ways from the 1960s to contemporary times.
This edited collection provides a range of transdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of writing across the Humanities through the lens of inclusion and equity in higher education. In three parts - From Disciplinary Practice to Transdisciplinary Application, The Collective We: Transparent Pedagogy in Praxis, Power in Presence: From Chalkboard to Pavement - the chapters focus on teaching triumphs and challenges, specific learning objectives and best practices, theories and their applications, and concrete examples of campus action within specific institutional or socio-historical contexts. In whole, the book represents what a socially just classroom looks like from first-year university wri...