Page 79 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

48 CHAPTER 2

spaces will not be enough to motivate change, however. If the axiom
"assessment drives instruction" is to hold any power as convergence
continues between computers and writing assessment, then Compo-
sition must consider in greater depth what the implications are for
assessment should mundane texts persist in internetworked
environments.

TRANSFORMING ASSESSMENT

In writing assessment—regardless of whether it takes a holistic,
primary trait, scalar, or portfolio form—educators also generally
rely on a traditional understanding of transparency to measure the
writing and the presence of literacy. That is, the assessors expect to
see the text's physical representation to determine how the writer
put the finished pieces together in ways recognized by authorita-
tive Others in society. In these situations, narratives and personal
experiences take on a particular structure that differs from exposi-
tory or argument and research writing. Consequently, writing as-
sessment technology maintains strong modernist roots that
correspond well to the culturally salient or aesthetically valued
texts described earlier in this chapter as compared with the mun-
dane text. These roots evolved from the long history of heuristics,
rules, constraints, and perceptions that guide learned writing. By
studying the text's form and how well the student writer uses vari-
ous techniques to create his or her own text, evaluators make infer-
ences about the ways in which a writer constructed the work and
what skill level to rank the writer.
Irrespective of the assessment method used, all models are
grounded in the behaviorist notion that an instructor can read and
assess student writing from repeatedly observing, separating, and
classifying student prose into specific categories that connect to the
instructor's prior expectations about a writing genre. If writing
teachers look carefully at the groupings used to prepare the differ-
ent checklists or scoring guides implemented in common writing
assessment situations, it should be noted that transparency ex-
tends only to what the evaluator can actually see—the surface er-
rors and structure. The real inner workings of a student composing
an essay, a narrative, a research paper, or a portfolio are obscured.
Evaluators cannot peer into the minds of student writers as they
compose to see the interconnectivity of thoughts and idea patterns.