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TRANSFORMING TEXTS 49

Instead, evaluation rubrics are created to assess and measure
what is visible in a student's writing. However, these templates are
little more than representative criteria for what good writing is in a
given context. These rubrics are then applied to a representation of
student works to ascertain whether a student reached a prescribed
competency level. In some writing situations, as Bob Broad (2002)
noted, rubrics are not helpful for teachers making an evaluation. So
what we find is that in many assessment contexts, writing special-
ists use representations to measure representations. We must be
aware, though, that some compositionists and certainly educational
test and measurement practitioners hold the view that profession-
ally designed assessment tools like rubrics do indeed measure what is
intended to be measured and that these mechanisms offer students
and instructors closure. Yet, as I point out in chapter 4, there is far
more to this discussion than surface or predictive validity when han-
dling electronic texts. Compositionists as well as test and measure-
ment specialists must find a new language to describe how validity
and reliability functions with electronic writing.
Although conventional writing assessment provides closure to a
writing class, a composition sequence, or a graduating student's ac-
ademic career, it may be more opaque than transparent for what re-
ally happens in a student's composing processes, particularly in
online classes. For those who teach some or all of their writing
classes in a networked environment, the opacity of traditional writ-
ing assessment for measuring students' online thinking and writing
becomes all too apparent. To accommodate the changes in thinking,
organizing, and developing behaviors that a student writer under-
goes in an internetworked writing space, writing assessment must
also be transformed to reflect the types of skills, essential writer's
knowledge, and discursive strategies needed to be literate in a
technological environment.
Computers certainly make postmodern considerations of lan-
guage and thought transparent in the visible sense. We can see the
fragmentation of syntax, the brevity of response (thought), and the
collapse of traditional papertext boundaries in any number of elec-
tronic publications. This transformation occurs particularly in
hypertexts, which, as Johndan Johnson-Eilola noted, make "visible
the operations and effects of powerful modern theories of reading
and writing—postmodernism and postructuralism, reader-response
criticism and critical literacy, and collaborative learning and social