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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.
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When Daniel J. Royer and Roger Gilles of Grand Valley State University spearheaded an effort to devise a program allowing schools to better assess their first-year students' writing abilities, all the while allowing students' to choose what classes they take, the result was a new method of placement called Directed Self-Placement. A little over a year ago, however, I began to interview students at SIUC and to speak with representatives from schools across the country about the unique problems posed by assessment and placement. In conjunction with my library-based research, I have taken the data from my empirical research and concluded that while DSP has been able to solve some of the dilemmas that can be created by placing students into classes based solely on unreliable performance measures, it has introduced a whole new set of troublesome situations that can occur when students fail to use this tool responsibly. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Increasing college completion rates is important not only for institutions of higher learning, but also for the nation. Success in the first year and persistence to second year are vital to increasing these completion rates. One aspect of the first-year experience is placement into math, reading and writing courses. A majority of college freshman are placed using standardized placement exams that determine if they take pre-college or college-level courses. Directed self-placement (DSP) is an alternative placement method that is being utilized in lieu of standardized placement exams at a small selection of institutions within the U.S. A secondary analysis was conducted to understand the relationships among DSP, student persistence and success. Specifically, analyses were conducted to understand how previous performance (high school GPA and ACT scores) related to student choice, persistence and success. Participants were from one private Midwestern university (N = 2,760). T-tests were conducted and effect sizes were calculated as well as a logistic regression, chi-square test of independence, and an ordinal regression. The results of the analyses provided evidence that previous performance, specifically high school GPA and ACT score were related to the DSP choice. It was also found that there is a relationship between DSP choice, student success, and persistence in preparatory and college-level writing courses. High school GPA and ACT score were found to be predictors of success in the first writing course. The ACT score was found to not be significantly related to persistence through course, but high school GPA was found to be significantly related. These findings underscored the need to explore alternative methods of placement beyond standardized placement exams.
From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students’ transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis. Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics. First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education. Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, ​Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, ​Michael Day, ​Bruce Feinstein, ​Patricia Freitag Ericsson, ​Nathan Garrett, ​Joanne Baird Giordano, ​Tawanda Gipson, ​Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, ​Holly Hassel, ​Jennifer Heinert, ​Ashley J. Holmes, ​Rita Malenczyk, ​Christopher P. Parker, ​Cassandra Phillips, ​Anna Plemons, ​Pegeen Reichert Powell, ​Marc Scott, Robin Snead, ​Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, ​Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, ​Susan Wolff Murphy
In Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960, Kelly Ritter uses materials from the archives at Harvard and Yale and contemporary theories of writing instruction to reconsider the definition of basic writing and basic writers within a socio-historical context. Ritter challenges the association of basic writing with only poorly funded institutions and poorly prepared students. Using Yale and Harvard as two sample case studies, Ritter shows that basic writing courses were alive and well, even in the Ivy League, in the early twentieth century. She argues not only that basic writers exist across institutional types and diverse student populations, but that the prevalence of these writers has existed far more historically than we generally acknowledge. Uncovering this forgotten history of basic writing at elite institutions, Ritter contends that the politics and problems of the identification and the definition of basic writers and basic writing began long before the work of Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations and the rise of open admissions. Indeed, she illustrates how the problems and politics have been with us since the advent of English A at Harvard and the heightened consumer-based policies that resulted in the new admissions criteria of the early twentieth-century American university. In order to recognize this long-standing reality of basic writing, we must now reconsider whether the nearly standardized, nationalized definition of “basic” is any longer a beneficial one for the positive growth and democratic development of our first-year writing programs and students.
While most English professionals feel comfortable with language and literacy theories, assessment theories seem more alien. English professionals often don’t have a clear understanding of the key concepts in educational measurement, such as validity and reliability, nor do they understand the statistical formulas associated with psychometrics. But understanding assessment theory—and applying it—by those who are not psychometricians is critical in developing useful, ethical assessments in college writing programs, and in interpreting and using assessment results. A Guide to College Writing Assessment is designed as an introduction and source book for WPAs, department chairs, teachers, and administrators. Always cognizant of the critical components of particular teaching contexts, O’Neill, Moore, and Huot have written sophisticated but accessible chapters on the history, theory, application and background of writing assessment, and they offer a dozen appendices of practical samples and models for a range of common assessment needs. Because there are numerous resources available to assist faculty in assessing the writing of individual students in particular classrooms, A Guide to College Writing Assessment focuses on approaches to the kinds of assessment that typically happen outside of individual classrooms: placement evaluation, exit examination, programmatic assessment, and faculty evaluation. Most of all, the argument of this book is that creating the conditions for meaningful college writing assessment hinges not only on understanding the history and theories informing assessment practice, but also on composition programs availing themselves of the full range of available assessment practices.
Translingualism perceives the boundaries between languages as unstable and permeable; this creates a complex challenge for writing pedagogy. Writers shift actively among rhetorical strategies from multiple languages, sometimes importing lexical or discoursal tropes from one language into another to introduce an effect, solve a problem, or construct an identity. How to accommodate this reality while answering the charge to teach the conventions of one language can be a vexing problem for teachers. Crossing Divides offers diverse perspectives from leading scholars on the design and implementation of translingual writing pedagogies and programs. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines methods of theorizing translinguality in writing and teaching. Part 2 offers three accounts of translingual approaches to the teaching of writing in private and public colleges and universities in China, Korea, and the United States. In Part 3, contributors from four US institutions describe the challenges and strategies involved in designing and implementing a writing curriculum with a translingual approach. Finally, in Part 4, three scholars respond to the case studies and arguments of the preceding chapters and suggest ways in which writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators can develop translingual approaches within their own pedagogical settings. Illustrated with concrete examples of teachers’ and program directors’ efforts in a variety of settings, as well as nuanced responses to these initiatives from eminent scholars of language difference in writing, Crossing Divides offers groundbreaking insight into translingual writing theory, practice, and reflection. Contributors: Sara Alvarez, Patricia Bizzell, Suresh Canagarajah, Dylan Dryer, Chris Gallagher, Juan Guerra, Asao B. Inoue, William Lalicker, Thomas Lavelle, Eunjeong Lee, Jerry Lee, Katie Malcolm, Kate Mangelsdorf, Paige Mitchell, Matt Noonan, Shakil Rabbi, Ann Shivers-McNair, Christine M. Tardy
Volume III of the Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, like Volumes I and II, is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of current research into social contexts of second language (L2)/foreign language (FL) teaching and learning; language policy; curriculum; types of instruction; incremental language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar; international communication; pragmatics; assessment and testing. It differs from earlier volumes in its main purpose—to provide a more in-depth discussion and detailed focus on the development of the essential language skills required for any type of communication: speaking, listening, reading, vocabulary, grammar, and writing. Volume III preserves continuity with previous volumes in its coverage of all the classical areas of research in L2/FL teaching and learning and applied linguistics, but rather than offering a historical review of disciplinary traditions, it explores innovations and new directions of research, acknowledges the enormous complexity of teaching and learning the essential language abilities, and offers a diversity of perspectives. Chapter authors are all leading authorities in their disciplinary areas. What’s new in Volume III? Updates the prominent areas of research, including the sub-disciplines addressed in Volumes I and II, and represents the disciplinary mainstays Considers and discusses perspectives held by different schools of thought on the what, the how, and the why of teaching foundational language skills, including theories, pedagogical principles, and their implementation in practice Captures new and ongoing developments and trends in the key areas of L2/FL teaching and learning, and innovative research topics that have gained substantial recognition in current publications, including the role of corpora, technology, and digital literacy in L2/FL teaching and learning Examines new trends in language pedagogy and research, such as an increased societal emphasis on teaching academic language for schooling, somewhat contradictory definitions of literacy, and the growing needs for instruction in intercultural communication.