Page 53 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

20 CHAPTER 1

a piece of student writing. Past practices, such as indirect assessment
and direct assessment featuring holistic scoring or primary trait
analysis, allowed writing programs or instructors to create some
type of consensus-driven, concrete criteria and apply them to a wide
range of reading situations. This system worked well because the
product, the exam or the essay, was developed by a single writer and
reflected a single voice, usually that of the instructor. In the years
ahead, as the synergy between computing and writing becomes
complete, writing instructors and their programs will need to con-
sider very different criteria for successful online composing than
those used now. Eventually, writing teachers will have to measure
interactivity, visuality, and aurality combined with writing in a
truly authentic context like a web page or a blog. This future situa-
tion not only requires faculty to reconsider writing assessment and
its implications when full computer convergence in Composition oc-
curs; it also demands that Composition's culture begin to rethink
what it means to be literate in a digital society. As the concept of liter-
acy broadens in a digital environment to incorporate the use of in-
formation technologies, so must the concept of assessment be
expanded if there is any hope of retaining validity in the evaluation
process. Although the dilemma of validity arises in a later chapter, it
is important early on for readers to begin thinking about the ques-
tions surrounding validity in computer-based classrooms that must
have a writing assessment component.
The discussion of validity in writing assessment merged with
computer technology is taken up in a later chapter. In this section,
however, it is more important for us to explore the implications for
writing assessment when convergence affects the evaluation pro-
cess. First, we need to contemplate some general perceptions about
writing assessment and how computer-based writing instruction
explodes these impressions.
A standard yet simplistic description of writing assessment as
many educators often define it was pulled from a current textbook
on authentic literacy assessment:

Composition is the interaction of the writer's knowledge, the text to be
created, and the context within which writing occurs .... Specifically,
the writer's knowledge consists of (1) knowledge of the writing pro-
cess, (2) topic knowledge, (3) discourse knowledge (knowledge of text
structures, such as narrative, expository, persuasive), (4) vocabulary
knowledge, (5) interest in writing, (6) motivation to write, and (7)