Irwin Weiser


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Syllabus for English 680A: Seminar in Writing Assessment

Spring 2004

Week One:     Getting Started

 January 13:       Introduction

January 15:       Creating a Context for Studying Writing Assessment

 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment.”  CCC 50.3 (1999): 483-503. Available on-line through Thor (Jstor). Volume 49 and newer are also available at http://archive.ncte.org/ccc/

 

CCCC Committee on Assessment. “Writing Assessment” A Position Statement.” CCC 46.3 (1995): 430-37. Available on-line through Thor (Jstor).

 

Week Two:     One Scholar’s Recent Perspective

 

January 20:       Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Chapters 1 and 2

January 22:       Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Chapters 3 and 4

 

Week Three:

 

January 27:       Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Chapters 5 and 6

January 29:       Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Chapter 7

 

Week Four:    Other(s) Perspectives on Assessment

 

February 3:       Discuss Project One Choices

 

Cooper, Charles, and Lee Odell. (Eds.). Evaluating Writing: Describing, Measuring, Judging.  Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1977.  Introduction, Chapter 1, Cooper, “Holistic Evaluation of Writing” and Chapter 2, Lloyd-Jones, “Primary Trait Scoring.”

 

February 5:      

Camp, Roberta.  “Changing the Model for the Direct Assessment of Writing.” in Huot and Williamson, Validating Holistic Scoring for Writing Assessment. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1993, 45-78.

 


 

Week Five:     Other(s) Perspectives, Continued

 

February 10:     Ruth, Leo P., and Sandra Murphy. "Designing Topics for Writing Assessment." College Composition and Communication 35(Dec 1984): 410-422.

 

Moss, Pamela A.  "Validity in High Stakes Writing Assessment."  Assessing Writing 1(1994): 109-128.

 

Wiggins, Grant. "The Constant Danger of Sacrificing Validity to Reliability: Making Writing Assessment Serve Writers."  Assessing Writing 1(1994): 129-139.

 

February 12:     Project One Oral and Written Reports

 

Week Six:       Responding to Student Writing

 

February 17:     Some Classics on Response

 

               Horvath, Brooke K. “The Components of Written Response: A Practical   Synthesis of Current Views, Rhetoric Review 2.2 (Jan. 1994): 136-156. We’re reading the text; the rest of the article is a bibliography that you may wish to consult.

              

               MacAllister, Joyce. “Responding to Student Writing.” In Griffin, C.W. New Directions for Teaching and Learning: Teaching Writing in All Disciplines, no. 12. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1982, 59-65.

 

Sommers, Nancy. "Responding to Student Writing."  College Composition and       Communication 33(May 1982): 148-156.

 

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English 55.7 (Feb. 1993): 187-206.

 

February 19: Response and Error

 

Connors, Robert J., and Andrea Lunsford. “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research.” College Composition and Communication. 39.4 ( Dec.1988): 395-409.

 

Sloan, Gary. “Frequency of Errors in Essays by College Freshmen and by Professional Writers.” College Composition and Communication 41.3 (Oct. 1990): 299-308.

 

Haswell, Richard H. “Minimal Marking.” College English 45.6 (Oct. 1983): 600-604.

Week Seven:  Responding to Student Writing, continued

 

February 24: How Students Read Responses

 

               Hayes, Mary F., and Donald A. Daiker. “Using Protocol Analysis in Evaluating Responses to Student Writing.” Freshman English News 13.2 (Fall 1984): 1-4, 10.

 

O’Neill, Peggy, and Jane Matheson Fife. “Listening to Students: Contextualizing Response to Student Writing.” Composition Studies 27.2 (1999): 39-51.

 

February 26: Grading

 

Boyd, Richard. “The Origins and Evolution of Grading Student Writing.” In Zak, Frances, and Christopher Weaver, eds. The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Albany, NY: SUNYP, 1998, 3-16.

 

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Why I (used to) Hate to Give Grades.” CCC 48.3 (Oct. 1997): 360-371.

 

Weaver, Christopher C. “Grading in a Process-based Writing Classroom.” In Zak, Frances, and Christopher Weaver, eds. The Theory and Practice of Grading Writing: Problems and Possibilities. Albany, NY: SUNYP, 1998, 141-150.

 

Discuss Project Two Choices

 

Week Eight:    Grading continued/Technology and Assessment Issues     

 

March 2:  Diverse Approaches to Grading

 

TOPIC/ICON at Texas Tech University: http://ttopic.english.ttu.edu/manual/manualframe.asp?typeof=icon

 

Sommers, Jeffrey. “Grading Student Writing: An Experiment and Commentary.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College. 20.4 (1993): 263-274.

 

March 4: Technology and Assessment Issues

 

Hawisher, Gail E., and Charles Moran. “Responding to Writing On-Line.” In Mary Deane Sorcinelli and Peter Elbow, eds. Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997, 115-125.

 

Huot, Brian. “Computers and Assessment: Understanding Two Technologies.” Computers and Composition. 13.2 (1996): 231-244. This article and the next and those for April 1 can be accessed electronically at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/87554615

 

               Takayoshi, Pamela. “The Shape of Electronic Writing: Evaluating and Assessing Computer-Assisted Writing Processes and Products.” Computers and Composition. 13.2 (1996): 245-258.

 

               Moran, Charles, and Anne Herrington. “Evaluating Academic Hypertexts.” In Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot, eds. Teaching Writing with Computers. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003, 247-357.

 

Week Nine: Assessment, Response & Diversity

 

March  9:

 

Haswell, Janis, and Richard H. Haswell. “Gendership and the Miswriting of Students.” College Composition and Communication 46.2 (May 1995): 223-254.

 

Kamusikiri, Sandra. “African American English and Writing Assessment.” In White, Edward M., William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri, eds. Assessment of Writing: Politics, Policies, Practices. NY: MLA, 1996, 187-203.

 

Hamp-Lyons, Liz. “The Challenges of Second-Language Writing Assessment.” In White, Edward M., William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri, eds. Assessment of Writing: Politics, Policies, Practices. NY: MLA, 1996, 226-240.

 

Discuss Book Review Choices

 

March 11:  Project Two Oral and Written Reports

 

Week Ten: Spring Break

 

March 16:  No Class

March 18:  No Class

 

Week Eleven:            CCCC

 

March 23:  No Class

March 25:  No Class; Purdue Annual Reunion at CCCC TBA

 

Week Twelve: Portfolios for Multiple Purposes

 

March 30: An Overview of Portfolio Use

 

Weiser, Irwin. “Portfolios in the Teaching and Assessing of Writing.” In the  Annotated Instructors’ Edition of The Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers, 5th ed., by Lynn Quitman Troyka. Prentice Hall, 1999: AIE 14-21.

 

April 1: Electronic Portfolios

 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Portfolio, Electronic, and the Links Between.”  Computers and Composition. 13.2 (1996): 129-133.

 

Purvis, Alan C. “Electronic Portfolios.” Computers and Composition. 13.2 (1996): 135-146.

 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “The Electronic Portfolio: Shifting Paradigms.” Computers and Composition. 13.2 (1996): 259-262.

 

Week Thirteen:  Portfolios/Placement

 

April 6: Portfolios for Placement

           

Borrowman, Shane. “The Trinity of Portfolio Placement: Validity, Reliability, and Curriculum Reform.” WPA 23.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 7-28.

 

Daiker, Donald A., Jeff Sommers, Gail Stygall. “The Pedagogical Implications of a College-Placement Portfolio.” In White, Edward M., William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri, eds. Assessment of Writing: Politics, Policies, Practices. NY: MLA, 1996, 257-270.

 

Black, Laurel, Donald A. Daiker, Jeffrey Sommers, Gail Stygall. “Writing Like a Woman and Being Rewarded for It: Gender, Assessment, and Reflective Letters from Miami Univerisity’s Student Portfolios.” In 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, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1994, 235-247.

           

April 8: Other Placement Practices and Issues

 

Huot, Brian. “A Survey of College and University Writing Placement Practices,” WPA 17.3 (Spring 1994): 49-65.

 

Royer, Daniel J. and Roger Gilles. “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation,” CCC 50.1 (1998): 54-70.

 

Harrington, Susanmarie. “New Visions of Authority in Placement Test Rating,” WPA 22.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1998): 53-84.

 

Week Fourteen: Writing Proficiency/Reflection and Assessment

 

April 13: Writing Proficiency

 

White, Edward M. “Assessing Writing Proficiency.” Chapter 8 of Teaching and Assessing Writing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994, 150-170.

 

Sandman, John. “Self-Evaluation Exit Essays in Freshman Composition: ‘Now I Have New Weaknesses’.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 20.3 (1993): 275-278.

 

April 15: Reflection and Assessment

 

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Reflection and Assessment.” Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan, UT: USUP, 1998, 145-168.

 

Week Fifteen:  Program Evaluation/Reflections

 

April 20: Program Evaluation

 

McLeod, Susan H. “Evaluating Writing Programs: Paradigms, Problems, Possibilities.” JAC 12.2 (1992): 373-382.

 

“The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition.” WPA 23.1/2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 59-70.

 

Morgan, Meg. “The Crazy Quilt of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum: Achieving WAC Program Assessment.” In Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot, eds. Assessing Writing Across the Curriculum: Diverse Approaches and Practices. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997: 141-157.

 

“Report of the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Assessment.” ADE 114 (Fall 1996): 2-13.

 

April 22: Reflections on Writing Assessment

 

Week Sixteen:

 

April 27:           Oral Reports on Book Review

April 29:           Oral Reports on Book Review; Written Review Due, Course Evaluation