Page 127 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

94 CHAPTER 4

can only evaluate students' writing after the instructors observe the
changes that are noted through teacher and peer comments, student
reflection, or other types of documented evidence. The reporting of
results during an assessment includes detailed explanations, com-
mentary, and more layers of reflection. Yet usually, portfolios are
read holistically based on some sort of rubric that segments writing.
Moreover, portfolios are increasingly subjected to the breaking out
of criteria in a barrier exam format. Therefore, what instructors find
is that even a more qualitative form of assessment like portfolios can
be transformed into the language and actions associated with the
psychometric model.
Because most composition specialists now try to create a very
different reality concerning writing assessment compared with the
psychometricians' methods, one has to ask, why is Composition
still using the definitions from an antiquated approach to describe
and explain the changes that occur in student writing? As Brian
Huot (2002) noted, because Composition never truly claimed writ-
ing assessment as part of its domain, there is no reason for the field
to attempt to reclaim or rearticulate the psychometricians' dis-
course. With the great influx of computer-enhanced writing
classes, this question is particularly salient, and it clearly affects
what happens in the college writing curriculum. Not only does the
blending of assessment technology and computer technology re-
configure classroom space and instructional techniques, students'
perceptions of their authorial rights, and the characteristics of the
text; it also affects how compositionists study their students' fin-
ished work. These older rubrics and concepts are a poor fit for the
multiple layers of composing that happen in networked assign-
ments because they have accounted for neither visual rhetoric nor
the development of the types of content and the variations of style
that exist in electronic texts.
Writing instructors must realize that quantitative and qualita-
tive methodologies ask faculty to view the individual writer in dis-
tinct ways; the quantifier sees the student writer as one of many,
and she places the writer in categories that correspond to general
observations about behaviors, attitudes, and expectations. The
qualifier looks at students as independent beings, each one possess-
ing very different sets of abilities, and assessment cannot group
these abilities into nice, neatly separated categories. This separate
worldview toward assessment leads to the quantifier needing large