Page 141 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

108 CHAPTER 4

tronic text is a blog, a MOO, a web site, or hypertext, the work can be
evaluated on a full range of technical, mechanical, aesthetic, affec-
tive, rhetorical, intellectual, and social criteria defined by the in-
structor, the program, or the department. Broad's DCM system
depends on the deep assessment approach put forward earlier in this
chapter in order to collect and discuss student networked writing in
a thoughtful manner. Through an instructor's use of the DCM, stu-
dents can chart their progress in various areas and note where
growth and slippage occur across assignments or over time. For a
program or a department, the adoption of a model like the DCM pro-
vides the context in which to discuss the evaluation of students' elec-
tronic texts to enact curricular or instructional changes that
improve writing instruction for networked environments. As I pro-
pose in the next section, the DCM approach leads Composition Stud-
ies to redefine validity and reliability in ways that mesh with the
growing use of e-texts in the writing classroom.

DEVELOPING A "NEW" VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY

The notion of deep assessment and the development of deep assess-
ment programs like the OLR, TOPIC/ICON, and DCM is that they re-
place the flat, objectivist descriptions of validity and reliability with
an enriched overview of the students' real processes and contexts for
writing. One critical effect of technological convergence on assess-
ment is the destabilization of the scientific method used to ground
writing assessment by the computer's ability to emphasize the so-
cial values and subjectivity present in evaluation. This destabilizing
of established understandings inherent in the scientific method
surely changes how writing undergoes evaluation.
A start in this new direction for assessment begins with a revised
set of assumptions concerning writing, validity, and reliability. In
place of the older principles that guide assessment and were outlined
earlier in this chapter, a new collection of components drives evalua-
tions in computer-enhanced writing courses:

• Writing is multidimensional. The convergence of these two tech-
nologies has displaced the earlier concept that writing is an or-
derly and regular activity. Hypertext, MOOs, Daedalus
Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE), and archives of syn-
chronous and asynchronous e-mails indicate that writing runs