Aparna Sinha
Published: 2014
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With a diverse incoming population each year, California State Universities struggle to assess and place the students into different (basic/stretch) first year writing classes appropriately. The long history of debates over reliability and validity issues of assessing and placing students through timed tests have made more and more writing program administrators skeptical about placing their students through a placement test (Elbow, 1996; White, 1995; Hout, 2002; Lynne, 2004, Moss, 2009, etc.). Directed Self-Placement (DSP)--a placement method that allows students to place themselves into first year writing classes--proposes to solve the problem of placing through timed tests. Advocates of DSP (Blakesley, 2002; Blakesley et. al, 2003; Cornell & Newton, 2003; Royer & Gilles, 1998; 2003; Reynolds, 2003, etc.) argue that DSP allows students an authentic educational choice of two or more courses and helps them arrive at that decision based on their own understanding of their writing abilities. While the literature on DSP establishes its success, little research examines DSP and its effectiveness as a placement method while considering all the socio-cultural-historical-political factors that can mediate its implementation. Also, not enough is known on how individual student writers and their socio-cultural backgrounds and experiences come into play when they self-place, and how DSP operates vis-à-vis policies around remediation. This dissertation research examines DSP at a CSU while investigating all socio-cultural, political, and historical factors that can influence DSP's implementation. Through student experiences, teacher expectations, and specific case studies, this dissertation explains how students and their identity, backgrounds, and experiences, and institutional policies play into success and failures around self-placement. Findings indicate that students negatively evaluate their writing abilities because of their personal writing identity, placement scores, or any other institutional policy that informs them of their remediation status, making them develop a low self-efficacy around writing to choose a stretch course over a semester long course. Also, students prefer placing in a mainstream stretch course over an ESL stretch course, rejecting the ESL label. The study also shows a gap in FYW teachers' understanding of state and institutional policies, demonstrating the importance of aligning teachers' expectations with institutional policies around placement and remediation for the success of implementing DSP. Findings also demonstrate that Writing Program Administrators at each CSU have their own pedagogical thinking and philosophies around placement and remediation which do not necessarily resonate with the state enforced policies for all the CSUs. This leads to a power struggle between the administrators at institution level and the policy makers at the state level. Implications of this study recommend that the state policies makers should re-evaluate their remediation and placement policies, removing stigmatizing placement structure and deficit language and terminologies to denote remediation and multilingualism. Policies around writing programs should be created and evaluated locally, inclusive of teachers and students' perspectives. Therefore, the state policy makers are recommended to relinquish the power and delegate each CSU to run its own writing program. Additional implications address recommendations for FYW teachers to be more prepared to teach multilingual students and cross-cultural composition classes, while making sure that instruction is differentiated to cater to students at different levels. Finally, the study proposes a Socio-cultural DSP that enables students to self-place through a socio-cultural perspective to self-assessment and placement, but any future implementation of DSP must consider the socio-historic-political realities around placement and remediation at that institution.