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Response and Evaluation

342	Anson, Chris M. Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1989. Seventeen essays include Anson, "Response to Writing and the Paradox of Uncertainty"; David Bleich, "Reconceiving Literacy: Language Use and Social Relations"; Louise Phelps, "Images of Student Writing: The Deep Structure of Teacher Response"; Martin Nystrand and Deborah Brandt, "Response to Writing as a Context for Learning to Write"; Susan Wall and Glynda Hull, "The Semantics of Error: What Do Teachers Know?"; Thomas Newkirk, "The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference"; Richard Beach, "Demonstrating Techniques for Assessing Writing in the Writing Conference" [392]. See: Richard Beach, "Demonstrating Techniques for Assessing Writing in the Writing Conference" [392]. See: John D. Beard, Jone Rymer, and David L. Williams, "An Assessment System for Collaborative Writing Groups: Theory and Empirical Evaluation" [581].
343	Belanoff, Pat. "The Myth of Assessment." Journal of Basic Writing 10 (Spring 1991): 54–66. There are four myths of assessment. The first is that we know what we're testing for. Tests assume, falsely, that we can judge when writing is good enough for some purpose, to satisfy a requirement or to graduate, and they assume that we know what constitutes improvement. The second myth is that we know what we are testing. We cannot test ability, though: we simply judge the quality of a hastily written product, the result of a meaningless task, without reference to the writer at all. The third is that we agree both on criteria and on whether individual papers meet the criteria. But because texts do not contain meaning, readers inevitably differ about whether abstract criteria have been met. The final myth is that there is a standard of good writing that can be applied uniformly, an obvious misapprehension. Even communal portfolio assessment does not eliminate differences in judgment, but, by promoting discussion of teaching and criteria, it improves teaching, and, moreover, appears to be the best way to approach consensus.
344	Belanoff, Pat, and Marcia Dickson. Portfolios: Process and Product. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann-Boynton/Cook, 1991. Twenty-three essays on both practical and theoretical dimensions of portfolio assessment. Units cover proficiency testing, program assessment, using portfolios in courses, and political issues. Essays include Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, "State University of New York at Stony Brook Portfolio-based Evaluation Program"; David Smit, Patricia Kolonosky, and Kathryn Seltzer, "Implementing a Portfolio System"; Roberta Rosenberg, "Using the Portfolio to Meet State-Mandated Assessment"; Anne Sheehan and Francine Dempsey, "Bridges to Academic Goals: A Look at Returning Adult Portfolios"; Richard Larson, "Using Portfolios in the Assessment of Writing in the Academic Disciplines"; Jeffery Sommers, "Bringing Practice in Line with Theory: Using Portfolio Grading in the Composition Classroom"; Pamela Gay, "A Portfolio Approach to Teaching a Biology-Linked Basic Writing Course"; and Marcia Dickson, "The WPA, the Portfolio System, and Academic Freedom." Includes a cumulative bibliography of works cited.
345	Belanoff, Pat, and Peter Elbow. "Using Portfolios to Increase Collaboration and Community in a Writing Program." WPA 9 (Spring 1986): 27–40. Students prepare portfolios of three composition-course papers—one narrative or expressive, one formal essay conceptually organized, and one text analysis—plus cover sheets describing their writing processes and an unrevised piece of in-class writing. Students submit one or two pieces at midsemester to be evaluated without prejudice. Grades are pass-fail only, assigned by a group of teachers. The student's own teacher can ask for a second reading. This testing process, unlike the proficiency exam, rewards the student for collaboration and revision. It also builds community among the teachers, who have two chances each semester to discuss writing and grading standards and slowly work toward consensus on some issues. The portfolio system encourages collaboration between teachers and students and gives the teacher's coaching role more credibility. Finally, the system increases collaboration between teachers and program directors by bringing the course content into the open.
346	Black, Laurel, Donald A. Daiker, Jeffrey Sommers, and Gail Stygall, eds. New Directions in Portfolio Assessment: Reflective Practice, Critical Theory, and Large-Scale Scoring. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann- Boynton/Cook, 1994. Twenty-six essays representing a variety of research approaches to the questions of the validity and perceived benefits of portfolio assessment. Essays include Pat Belanoff, "Portfolios and Literacy: Why?"; Edward White, "Portfolios as an Assessment Concept"; Peter Elbow, "Will the Virtues of Portfolios Blind Us to Their Potential Dangers?"; James Berlin, "The Subversions of the Portfolio"; Glenda Conway, "Portfolio Cover Letters, Students' Self-Presentation, and Teachers' Ethics"; John Beall, "Portfolios, Research, and Writing about Science"; James Reither and Russell Hunt, "Beyond Portfolios: Scenes for Dialogic Reading and Writing"; Nedra Reynolds, "Graduate Writers and Portfolios: Issues of Professionalism, Authority, and Resistance"; Irwin Weiser, "Portfolios and the New Teacher of Writing"; Gail Stygall, et al., "Gendered Textuality: Assigning Gender to Portfolios"; Robert Broad, "'Portfolio Scoring': A Contradiction in Terms"; David Smit, "A WPA's Nightmare: Reflections on Using Portfolios as a Course Exit Exam"; and Carl Lovitt and Art Young, "Portfolios in the Disciplines: Sharing Knowledge in the Contact Zone."
347	Charney, Davida. "The Validity of Using Holistic Scoring to Evaluate Writing: A Critical Overview." Research in the Teaching of English 18 (February 1984): 65–81. A good test of writing ability must be both reliable (it must provide reproducible results) and valid (it must actually test what it claims to test). Many writing teachers have rejected quantitative tests as invalid, feeling that they do not actually measure writing ability. But qualitative tests are often unreliable, as raters disagree over what constitutes good writing. The use of holistically scored writing samples is now widely regarded as a reliable and valid testing method. But holistic scorers are often influenced by legibility, length, and unusual diction, casting doubt on the validity of this method.
348	Cooper, Charles R., and Lee Odell, eds. Evaluating Writing: Describing, Measuring, Judging. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1977. Six essays explain current techniques for assessing students' writing, including measures of syntactic complexity, intellectual maturity, and self-evaluating ability. Two important testing methods are described in Cooper and Odell, "Holistic Evaluation of Writing," and Richard Lloyd-Jones, "Primary Trait Scoring."
349	Cooper, Charles R., and Lee Odell, eds. Evaluating Writing: The Role of Teachers' Knowledge about Text, Learning, and Culture. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. A collection of seventeen essays covers a number of issues related to response, evaluation, and assessment, including describing students' writing, connecting teaching and evaluation, and examining assumptions and practices. Sections include assessment in four disciplines and the writing of dual-language students. Essays include Charles R. Cooper, "What We Know about Genres, and How It Can Help Us Assign and Evaluate Writing"; Richard W. Beach, "Evaluating Students' Response Strategies in Writing about Literature"; Arnetha F. Ball, "Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: The Case of the African American Vernacular English Speaker"; Chris M. Anson, "Reflective Reading: Developing Thoughtful Ways to Respond to Students' Writing"; Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith, "Creating a Climate for Portfolios"; and Roxanne Mountford, "Let Them Experiment: Accommodating Diverse Discourse Practices in Large-Scale Writing Assessment."
350	Diederich, Paul. Measuring Growth in English. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1974. Diederich discusses factor analysis of readers' responses to essay tests; avoidance of reader bias; reliability of statistical results; standard deviation; comparative reliability of objective and essay tests; and design of tests. Appendices describe criteria for evaluating essay tests, sample essay topics, and sample objective questions. See Cooper and Odell [348] for newer testing methods, but Diederich's work is essential for explaining statistical problems.
351	Faigley, Lester, Roger D. Cherry, David A. Jolliffe, and Anna M. Skinner. Assessing Writers' Knowledge and Processes of Composing. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1985. Current methods of evaluating writing do not adequately reflect the research on composing that has prompted many writing programs to teach the composing process. Better evaluation would consider the literary, cognitive, and social dimensions of composing, and measure what writers know as well as what they do. Two methods developed for this study attempt to assess knowledge and process. In the first method, writers describe the knowledge they will apply to a given writing task (about situation, form, content, and so on). The second method is a "process log" of the actual writing experience. This book presents an extensive overview of research; the results of a study of writers' planning, writing, and revising and their task-related knowledge; and a thorough discussion of the relationship between theories of composing and theories of assessment.
352	Garrison, Roger. "One-to-One: Tutorial Instruction in Freshman Composition." New Directions for Community Colleges 2 (Spring 1974): 55–84. Professional writers learn their craft by writing with the help of an editor. Freshman writers can learn the same way if the classroom is set up as a workshop in which students work independently, at their own pace, and consult the instructor for editorial guidance in brief conferences. The instructor should suggest writing projects tailored to each student's personal or career interests. Garrison provides detailed advice on commenting effectively in a short conference.
353	Greenberg, Karen. "Validity and Reliability Issues in the Direct Assessment of Writing." WPA: Writing Program Administration 16 (Fall–Winter 1992): 7–22. Writing teachers prefer direct assessment—that is, holistically scored essay tests—to indirect, multiple-choice tests. Yet direct assessment is still criticized by the College Board on grounds of inter-rater unreliability, based on studies through the years that show greater reliability for indirect measures. But multiple-choice tests, scored mechanically, will always produce high reliability. Such tests, moreover, focus on the less important components of writing and reflect cultural bias. Differences in judgment on essays reflect the complexity of reading and writing, and good scoring procedures increase reliability. The validity of indirect assessment has long been challenged, yet the College Board—despite the evidence of their own study showing that a writing sample calling for two or more rhetorical tasks has greatest construct validity—champions a cost-effective test that includes multiple choice. Portfolio assessment is clearly more relevant to theory and classroom practice, but it does not yet include a model of good writing that will boost construct validity. Though research is needed in this area, there is sufficient reason to be comfortable with a commitment to direct assessment.
354	Greenberg, Karen, Harvey S. Wiener, and Richard A. Donovan, eds. Writing Assessment: Issues and Strategies. New York and London: Longman, 1986. Twelve essays and an annotated bibliography (fifty-three entries) collected by the National Testing Network in Writing, which is based at the City University of New York. Included are Stephen P. Witte, Mary Trachsel, and Keith Walters, "Literacy and the Direct Assessment of Writing: A Diachronic Perspective"; Edward M. White, "Pitfalls in the Testing of Writing"; Gertrude Conlon, "'Objective' Measures of Writing Ability"; Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., "Testing Black Student Writers"; Gordon Brossell, "Current Research and Unanswered Questions in Writing Assessment."
355	Harris, Muriel. Teaching One-to-One: The Writing Conference. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1986. Conferences should be an integral part of teaching writing. Many teachers find conferences their most helpful pedagogical strategy, useful at every stage of the writing process, and capable of improving the writer's sense of audience and purpose. To have successful conferences, teachers should consider their goals, their role in the conference, meeting formats, and scheduling. Conversation should be purposefully directive or nondirective in keeping with the immediate goals. To diagnose student difficulties and provide help in solving problems, teachers should begin by diagnosing their own criteria, their teaching methods, and the composing styles of the students. Diagnosis leads to strategies for overcoming writer's block, for recognizing cultural differences, and for dealing with learning disabilities. Finally, the conference is a good setting for teaching grammar.
356	Haswell, Richard H., ed. Beyond Outcomes: Assessment and Instruction Within a University Writing Program. Ablex, 2001.
357	Haswell, Richard H. "Minimal Marking." CE 45 (October 1983): 600–604. Marking compositions is unpleasant and largely unproductive as well: correcting surface errors has virtually no effect on students' writing. A way to address this level of writing, though, is not to correct errors but to indicate their presence in a line of writing by a check in the margin. This method challenges the student to find and correct the errors, most of which turn out to be careless. Conceptual errors are now easier to address; the teacher's commenting time can be spent on substance; and students move more effectively to mastery.
358	Horvath, Brooke K. "The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views." Rhetoric Review 2 (January 1985): 136–56. Rpt. in Corbett, Myers, and Tate [358]. The consensus of advice on formative evaluation (feedback on drafts as opposed to summative evaluation of final products) suggests that teachers should avoid correcting and rewriting students' papers and should instead ask questions, suggest changes, and assign new tasks. The goal of formative evaluation is to promote learning and help students approximate skilled writers' behavior. Teachers should remember to put responses in appropriate order (large-scale concerns before mechanics), leave the authorship with the student, and avoid unhelpful comments. Bibliography contains eighty-one annotated items.
359	Huot, Brian. "Toward a New Theory of Writing Assessment." CCC 47.4 (December 1996): 549–66. Traditional writing assessment practices, rooted in positivism, are beginning to be redefined through revised views of validity that account for context, site specificity, and institutional needs. Placement or exit procedures at three universities illustrate "emergent assessment methods" focused on context while bypassing inter-rater reliability. Concerns about reliability are heightened in "contextually stripped environments" but can be just one way to judge a worthwhile assessment. Specific communicative tasks, created within a meaningful rhetorical situation, can eliminate testing technologies and will require different procedures through which to validate these procedures. An assessment scheme rich in context will emphasize local control and will make inter-rater reliability irrelevant.
360	Anson, Chris M. "Response and the Social Construction of Error." Assessing Writing 7(2000); 5–21. Writing instructors remain unsettled about the role of error in response and evaluation, perhaps because there has been very little research on teacher response to error. Existing scholarship—numerous attempts to quantify errors—might be extended to explore the social dimensions of error in response to student writing; that is, to tell us what teachers are thinking when they encounter errors in student writing. What sources of knowledge do teachers act on in responding to students' errors? Many of the socially constructed decisions about hyphen usage, for example, that take place among editors and publishers, are slow to reach writing teachers, who do not always approach "correctness" as a shifting, constantly modified code of language conventions. The relationship between error and response may be explored through reflective practice and the use of instructional "filters," consciously applied to determine when instruction about error will benefit students. Reflection in action brings into the classroom various histories of conventions and more attention to the relationship between rule-breaking and style, persona, or context. Knowing more about the effects of error on our reading processes unites response practices with realistic, context-based instruction. See: Priscilla S. Rogers, "Analytic Measures for Evaluating Managerial Writing" [594].
361	Rubin, Donnalee. Gender Influences: Reading Student Texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1993. Reader-response theories argue that men and women respond differently to literary texts. Nevertheless, research in which a group of male and female teachers were asked to evaluate unidentified essays reveals little gender bias. Longitudinal study of two teachers, one male and one female, also reveals little bias. The better a teacher knows his or her students — through, for example, a pedagogy that uses frequent conferencing — the less gender bias the teacher exhibits. Blind evaluation increases the chance of distortion by essay topics or styles uncongenial to the evaluator's gender identity. A maternal model of teaching, which gives a responsive reading to all students, attends to the contexts of writing, and encourages independence, most tends to obviate gender bias.
362	Smith, Jane Bowman and Kathleen Blake Yancey, eds. Self-Assessment and Development in Writing: A Collaborative Inquiry. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2000. Self-assessment is a phenomenon that can be approached in several ways: historical, theoretical, practical, ethical, and conceptual. Eleven chapters include Thomas L. Hilgers, Edna L. Hussey, and Monica Stitt-Bergh, "The Case for Prompted Self-Assessment in the Writing Classroom"; Susan Latta and Janice Lauer, "Student Self-Assessment: Some Issues and Concerns from Postmodern and Feminist Perspectives"; Rebecca Moore Howard, "Applications and Assumptions of Student Self-Assessment"; Chris M. Anson, "Talking about Writing: A Classroom-Based Study of Students' Reflections on Their Drafts"; Vicki Tolar Collins, "Freewriting in the Middle: Self-Help for College Writers Across the Curriculum"; Irwin Weiser, "Self-Assessment, Reflection, and the New Teacher of Writing."
363	Smith, Summer. "The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing." CCC 48.2 (May 1997): 249–68. End comments on student papers can be understood as secondary speech genres, with "relatively stable content, style, and structure." Not interested in finding contradictions or measuring specificity in teachers' end comments, this study of 313 representative end comments seeks to determine the features of end comments and the range of options available to commenters. Sixteen primary genres were identified, grouped into three categories: judging, reader response, and coaching. The most frequently identified genres included "evaluation of development" and "suggestion for revision of current paper," and 88 percent of end comments begin with a positive evaluation. When patterns of selecting from the repertoire of commenting conventions do not vary, students may dismiss the commentary as generic and formulaic.
364	Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to Student Writing." CCC 32 (May 1982): 148–56. Rpt. in Teaching Writing: Theories and Practices. Ed. J. Travers. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1988. "Teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting." In this study, comments by teachers directed students to edit sentences and to rethink and expand the topic at the same time. This is contradictory advice, urging students to treat the text as finished while treating the subject as unfinished. Instead of using comments to justify grades, teachers should respond to the meaning and purpose of early drafts and leave editing corrections for later, thus encouraging students to revise more extensively rather than to patch up the text. Braddock Award winner.
365	Straub, Richard. "The Concept of Control in Teacher Response: Defining the Varieties of 'Directive' and 'Facilitative' Commentary." CCC 47.2 (May 1996): 223–51. With remarkable consistency in the literature, teachers are urged to be facilitative and not directive in their responses to student writing. However, between these two extremes, teacher commentary can take a number of forms that resist a neat binary. Analyzing teacher commentary by focuses and modes illustrates the varying degrees of control that teachers exercise. Five teachers who wrote comments on the same student draft used different strategies for giving the student help and direction without usurping the student's choices. This study suggests that we "should not reject all directive styles of response any more than we should all adopt some standard facilitative style."
366	Walvoord, Barbara E. Fassler. Helping Students Write Well: A Guide for Teachers in All Disciplines. 2nd ed. New York: MLA, 1990. To help students write well, teachers should communicate expectations clearly, respond to writing without rewriting students' papers for them, and use grades to coach as well as evaluate writing. Walvoord provides a wealth of practical advice, primarily for the novice writing teacher, with sample assignments, student papers, and comments.
367	White, Edward M. Teaching and Assessing Writing. 2nd ed. San Francisco and London: Jossey-Bass, 1994. Assessment can have a damaging influence on writing instruction, but, used properly, may improve teaching and demonstrate the value of what we do. Formative assessment should be used to help students progress and to understand that product assessment is the inevitable end of writing in college. Writing teachers should, for example, help students learn how to take essay tests, which students will encounter frequently. External or summative assessment is similarly inevitable, and writing program administrators are well advised to understand the language of testing from a variety of perspectives, in an effort to produce fair and satisfactory tests. White offers much commonsense advice on testing, organizing holistic tests, program evaluation, and using testing and evaluation in teaching.
368	Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment as a Rhetorical Act." CCC 50.3 (February 1999): 483–503. The history of writing assessment can be traced in various ways. The one located in method sees three waves: the first in the form of objective tests, the second as holistically scored essays, and the third or most current as portfolio and programmatic assessment. In the first wave, reliability and testing specialists dominated the field; in the second wave, validity became a major concern, and the disciplinary machinery was developed to support and disseminate expertise in both writing and assessment. The third wave features a model of assessment that emphasizes validity and re-contextualizes reliability through multiple texts, different genres, and/or portfolios; more importantly, the third wave is creating knowledge both about assessment and our own practices. Only recently has assessment been seen as a knowledge-making endeavor. Understanding writing assessment as a rhetorical act that is both humane and ethical marks the most significant change of the last 50 years.
369	Yancey, Kathleen Blake, and Irwin Weiser, eds. Situating Portfolios: Four Perspectives. Logan: Utah State Univ. Press, 1997. Twenty-four essays in four sections—Theory and Power; Pedagogy; Teaching and Professional Development; and Technology—address themes of collaboration, models, and reflection in classroom portfolios, teacher portfolios, and large-scale portfolio assessment. Essays include Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, "Reflections on an Explosion: Portfolios in the '90s and Beyond"; Brian Huot and Michael M. Williamson, "Rethinking Portfolios for Evaluating Writing: Issues of Assessment and Power"; Sandra Murphy, "Teachers and Students: Reclaiming Assessment via Portfolios"; Mary Ann Smith, "Behind the Scenes: Portfolios in a Classroom Learning Community"; William Condon, "Building Bridges, Closing Gaps: Using Portfolios to Reconstruct the Academic Community"; Robert P. Yagelski, "Portfolios as a Way to Encourage Reflective Practice among Preservice English Teachers"; Irwin Weiser, "Revising Our Practices: How Portfolios Help Teachers Learn"; Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, "Wedding the Technologies of Writing Portfolios and Computers: The Challenges of Electronic Classrooms"; and Kristine L. Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, "Reflections on Reading and Evaluating Electronic Portfolios."
370	Zak, Frances, and Christopher C. Weaver, eds. The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998. Fifteen essays address "our myopia on the subject of grading" and put grading into dialogue with current theory. Essays include Bruce W. Speck and Tammy R. Jones, "Direction in the Grading of Writing? What the Literature on the Grading of Writing Does and Doesn't Tell Us"; Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot, "Construction, Deconstruction, and (Over)Determination: A Foucaultian Analysis of Grades"; Michael Bernard-Donals, "Peter Elbow and the Cynical Subject"; Nick Carbone and Margaret Daisley, "Grading as a Rhetorical Construct"; Maureen Neal, "The Politics and Perils of Portfolio Grading"; Cherryl Smith and Angus Dunstan, "Grade the Learning, Not the Writing"; and Peter Elbow, "Changing Grading While Working with Grades."