Page 109 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

76 CHAPTER 3

structor's establishing skill-and-drill exercises in these programs
and holistic scoring of student work. Students are still the silent
partners in writing assessment.
Even the most current, progressive ideas in computer-based writ-
ing instruction, such as students writing in hypertext, sound retro-
grade in this published example where the instructor outlines his
project goals for a portfolio assignment:

Before the first class was over, we began our semester-long discussion
of the issues of diversity on campus and worked through the first of
many drill and practice exercises in the Culp and Watkins Educators'
Guide to HyperCard. The standards I set for the students' hypertexts
were 1.) that they allow readers to contribute to the document in some
way; 2.) that they incorporate graphics into the document; 3.) that they
make some use of the audio capabilities of the Macintosh; and 4.) that
they produce a document useful to other students and faculty.
(Wickliff, in Yancey &Weiser, 1997, pp. 333-337)

Wickliff's published example, like so many unpublished ones, is
symptomatic of how traditional assessment talk undermines total
student ownership of the completed e-text. The language in
Wickliff's essay is as authoritarian as any found in an ETS scoring
rubric, and the first-day activities are as dry as any skill-and-drill
practice approach. This instructor, like so many others, takes the no-
tions of interactivity, visuality, perspective, and theory and reduces
them to fixed entities. As Wickliff clearly noted, the critieria for the
assignment are his, and his alone, even though the class is investi-
gating diversity issues.
In further describing what transpired in his course, Wickliff (1997)
explained the students' reflective memos. Even these were highly
structured responses constructed around several issues the instructor
developed. In this instance, the instructor reviewed the completed hy-
pertext in much the same way another would evaluate a timed es-
say—holistically. Although Wickliff reported that his students
remarked that they discovered a sense of ownership from working in
hypertext (1997), how much of this ownership would these students
have had if they shared more fully in the creation of the standards
used to evaluate the finished text or if they had more freedom to ex-
periment with hypertextual writing beyond the set drill and practice
exercises and the rigid assignment outline put before them?
Gregory Wickliff's (1997) example is presented not to attack him
but to show how tricky it is to blend the language and concepts from