Pedagogy 8 (3): 2008

The historical records embedded in our institutional self studies and program reviews allow for a retrospective on how assessment procedures have developed, incrementally at my institution. My experiences with writing assessment began in the mid 1980’s when my institution was heavily invested in freshman placement testing. As an adjunct in the English department who was teaching classes in developmental English, I was given an opportunity to “conduct research” with a senior colleague who was involved with a system-wide FIPSE grant to investigate placement procedures and first year writing expectations. I was given the task of locating and summarizing the current literature on placement processes, and during the task of compiling an annotated bibliography, I became convinced that one shot placement testing was essentially flawed. My so-called developmental students were often misplaced, some because of prompt design and others because their writing processes did not allow for their best work in an hour’s writing time. The institutional record of this beginning work in writing assessment is detailed in the earliest historical records, the self study report of 1989. At that time, we had piloted an assessment of our English composition sequence, including our developmental course, by asking for instructors to voluntarily collect and submit student writing samples.

The early history of writing assessment records our first dilemma: that of moving from volunteer submissions to required submissions. These were years when we relied on the collective energies of instructors who were fully invested with our program. Because a sizable number of composition instructors were adjuncts, we depended on the good will of senior faculty to contribute, and while most of the tenured faculty did teach occasional sections of freshman writing, many of them were not willing or interested in composition research. As we moved departmentally, from 1989 through the early 1990’s, away from the pre / post designs associated with freshman placement testing, into portfolio assessments, the institutional program reviews record incremental changes in attitude, participation, and refinements in our processes for collecting student work and in our methodologies for evaluation.

When I assumed the position of Director of Writing Assessment, as an instructor in 1991, because of another colleague’s movement to a chair’s position, I was again offered opportunities to further my research interests; in short, my department enticed me to take on the directorship, overseeing placement procedures, by offering to assist me with pursuit of the terminal degree. Entering a PhD program in August 1991, I was immediately impressed with the increased visibility of composition and rhetoric within the discipline, and I gradually focused my scholarly interests on Writing Across the Curriculum and portfolio assessment.

In 1992, since I work within a publicly funded state system of colleges and universities, I was just beginning to appreciate the control that the state legislators had over curricular decisions at the publicly funded institutions of higher education. At that time, I became very involved with a proactive group of faculty around the state who met at an annual conference to consider and present locally conducted research in writing assessment. I began to conduct surveys, interviews, and workshops on my campus, to ascertain how much interest and practices were already established because the current wisdom was that the state legislature was planning to mandate phasing out developmental programs in the state colleges and universities.