Page 137 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

104 CHAPTER 4

tative and qualitative members of a campus-wide study group, in-
structional design team, or administrative committee interested in
how writing is affected by technological convergence. Over time,
these audit trails establish a rich, generalizable body of knowledge
about a particular student population (or, for large- scale assess-
ment, an entire class of students).
As a way to deeply assess the writing activities and abilities of stu-
dents in interactive settings while retaining student ownership of the
written product, the OLR addresses five important stages: (a) build-
ing writers' confidence and independence, (b) acquiring skills and
strategies, (c) monitoring levels of prior and emerging experience, (d)
using writing and inquiry as ways of knowing and understanding,
(e) developing critical reflection (Syverson, 1999). For these reasons,
in OLR the evaluation better situates itself in the shifting contexts of
the computer-enhanced writing classroom because it depends far
less on the one-dimensional approach to measurement found in
skill-and-drill work or the two-dimensional procedures like "com-
petence and confidence" grounded in much of the current holistic es-
say and portfolio reading models that form the basis of other
computer-driven assessment tools.
The OLR is still in its infancy, and it is used in a limited manner at
the K-12 level in California and at the university level at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. Despite its newness, the OLR's early
phases indicate that Composition's convergence with competing
technologies can lead to developing a transformative assessment
practice that combines independent inquiry, ability, student own-
ership, limited teacher intervention, and critical knowledge about
situated discourse. As the OLR concept spreads and evolves, more
compositionists and administrators should see first-hand the effect
that deep assessment and convergence have for the teaching of
writing at the K-college level.
In fall 2002, Fred Kemp at Texas Tech University (TTU) instituted
the TOPIC/ICON program to handle the writing evaluation for TTU's
2,250 students in first-year composition. Given the size of TTU's pro-
gram, the sheer volume of information collected in TOPIC/ICON's da-
tabase would have to be enormous. According to the TOPIC/ICON
web site (www.english.ttu.edu:5555/manual), the database holds
more than 180,000 student documents. Clearly, in one semester, TTU
has built a massive foundation from which to mine information
about students' online writing activities and behaviors.