Page 130 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY 97

cornpositionists and their program heads need to consider what
qualitative techniques offer writing assessment that is better and
more dependable for their institution's needs.
Currently, electronic portfolios are the first foray into qualita-
tive methods applied to writing assessment procedures for online
classes. This move is based on the success that the common
papertext portfolio has had. Over the last 25 years, the traditional
paper portfolio has gained value as a valid and reliable application
for assessing student writing. Therefore, it makes sense to import
the idea into networked classrooms. However, as noted earlier, the
same difficulties that exist with paper portfolios also exist with
electronic portfolios. Selective pieces may be overwritten by faculty
or outsiders; only individual teachers or a team of teachers com-
pletes the evaluation process; fictionalizing—or maybe overex-
tending—the writer's abilities occurs because of clever reflective
texts, or in the case of e-texts, because of stronger visual literacy
skills or pixel manipulation; and the focus of evaluation still rests
primarily on product instead of process. All this becomes apparent
in many current computer-based writing assessment plans like the
one W. Dees Stallings presented to new teachers in his monograph
Distance Education (1997). Although Stallings is correct in suggest-
ing that subjective and objective criteria are critical for providing
effective writing assessment in computer-enhanced composition
classes, his model is based on traditional primary trait analysis
combined with an analytic scoring guide (1997, pp. 26-27). Al-
though rubrics like these work for standard academic writing as-
signments, and will work for the standard writing assignment
submitted to an instructor as an electronic file or in a webfolio, they
fall far short of addressing the qualities of interactivity, usability,
and visuality that are the hallmarks of e-texts. Instead, Stallings'
use of assessment checklists and scoring guides reinforces cur-
rent-traditional approaches to electronic writing instruction—and
the students' products still remain at the forefront of evaluation.
Authentic assessment in the networked classroom space must ac-
count for more than finished work that can be accessed online. It
should also include the public e-mails and chat exchanges, student
commentary from drafts composed in software programs like
WebCT or BlackBoard, or other nonfinished communication among
the class participants. Generally speaking, e-portfolios do not con-
tain this material, although they should. As Douglas Hesse recently