Extending Curriculum‐based Assessment to Early Writing

Early writing interventions can help students develop the writing skills they need to experience positive educational and postsecondary outcomes, but effective intervention requires instructionally relevant assessment data. Shapiro's curriculum‐based assessment (CBA) model integrates related yet distinct CBA approaches into a model that informs intervention. Extending this model to early writing poses challenges only recently addressed by research. On the basis of a review of relevant early writing research, this article outlines an instructionally relevant assessment model for early writing. Within the proposed model, the instructional hierarchy is suggested to directly connect early writing assessment with intervention. A discussion of potential limitations as well as future directions for research is included.     

Addressing the complexity of writing development: Toward an ecological model of assessment

This article offers one potential response to Yancey's (1999) call for a fourth wave of writing assessment able to capture writing development in all of its complexity. Based on an ecological perspective of literate development that situates students’ growth as writers across multiple engagements with writing, including those outside of school, the ecological model of writing assessment described in this article seeks to provide students, teachers, departments, and institutions with fuller, richer accounts of the breadth of students’ literate experiences and how those experiences impact their abilities to accomplish academic tasks throughout the undergraduate years and beyond. Using the University of Central Florida's recent efforts to develop and employ an ecological assessment model as one of many potential examples, this article argues that an ecological model of writing assessment enables institutions to make visible the multiple sites where writing takes place, strengthen the affordances for student learning and writing in these sites, and also respond effectively to the multiple stakeholders invested in understanding writing development, what it involves, and how it might best be supported.     

Apple Jumper,Teacher Babe,and Bland Uniformer Teachers: Fashioning Feminine Teacher Bodies

A student teacher group's conversation about teacher clothing as reflective of certain kinds of reprehensible or desirable teacher identities provoked the writing of this article. I use a feminist poststructuralist analysis to explore the three categories of women teachers' dress suggested by the student teachers as signifiers of women teachers' subjectivities discursively produced within the contexts of schooling. The article also challenges the three categories as constructions produced by this student teacher group in their positionality as young, White, middle-class, heterosexual female novice teachers in the Southeast region of the United States. This inquiry highlights the limitations and constrictions of women teachers' institutionalized subjectivities and suggests ways in which these limitations and constrictions offer sites for resistance, specifically in relation to clothing choices that shape and reflect a feminine teacher body.     

Does the use of Journals as a Form of Assessment put into Practice Principles of Feminist Pedagogy?

The writing of journals has become a popular form of assessment in women's studies courses, yet little work has addressed its authenticity as a form of feminist assessment. In this article, the learning journals of a class of tertiary teachers involved in a Postgraduate Diploma in Tertiary Teaching are analysed to determine the type of pedagogical practice that they reflect. The journals, and the pedagogical processes surrounding the use of the journals, were found to embrace many of the principles of critical and feminist pedagogy and to provide a valuable vehicle for the development of reflective professional practice. However, a focus on issues reflecting a wider context of social justice, for example, sexism and racism, was mostly only salient in the journals of the lecturers whose courses overtly involved these issues. These findings highlight a tension between respecting the rights of learners to construct their own knowledge and pursue areas of personal interest, and demanding attention to issues of equity and the role of education in social change.     

ArchiBabel: Tracing the Writing Architecture Project in Architectural Education

Though much recent scholarship has investigated the potential of writing in creative practice (including visual arts, drama, even choreography), there are few models in the literature which discuss writing in the context of architectural education. This article aims to address this dearth of pedagogical research, analysing the cross‐disciplinary Writing Architecture Project based in the undergraduate course of Queens University Belfast's School of Architecture. Over the course of four years, teaching staff, in partnership with the university's Learning Development Service, technicians and specialist librarians, have addressed an unfortunately persistent struggle for both architecture students and professionals alike to research and construct argument in written form. The article examines the current problem as identified in the literature before analysing the efficacy of the variety of teaching methods used in the Writing Architecture Project, with conclusions about the project's success and continuing challenges.     

Design Pedagogy for an Unknown Future: A View from the Expanding Field of Design Scholarship and Professional Practice

This article draws on current research investigating the notion of design for an unknown future. It reflects on recent thinking about the role of creativity in design practice and discusses implications for the development and assessment of creativity in the design studio. It begins with a review of literature on the issues and challenges associated with the assessment of creativity in design education. It then discusses and distinguishes three significant assessment models in design and creative arts education and emphasises the importance of opening debate on notions of creativity within the discipline. Following this, the article examines recent developments in the way that creativity is being practised, driven, fostered and implemented in contemporary design practice, and argues that these recent developments must feature in current scholarship about the development and assessment of creativity in design education. The article recommends areas for future research that pay close attention to developments in the rapidly expanding field of design practice.     

Hidden 'Treasure': New Genres, New Media and the Teaching of Writing

One young adolescent writer's fantasy narrative is used as an example of writings that blend genres and borrow conventions across media in contemporary student and professional fiction. Such writing raises issues for teachers, three of which are discussed: development of students' writing, assessment of writing, and awareness of copyright and ownership issues.     

Developing a community of research practice

Writing journal articles is essential for academics and professionals to develop their ideas, make an impact in their fields and progress in their careers. Research assessment makes successful performance in this form of writing even more important. This article describes a course on writing journal articles and draws on interviews with participants one year after the course in which they identified persistent challenges. These writers’ accounts make visible some of the processes of writing for publication that are often tacit and identify key writing strategies. However, they also identify barriers to writing in academic workplaces and those professional workplaces where academic writing is produced. This article concludes by suggesting that while research assessment values written outputs over almost everything else, it is equally important to legitimise writing processes—and to be able to articulate the development of these processes—in communities of research practice.     

Large-scale assessment,locally-developed measures,and automated scoring of essays: Fishing for red herrings?

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has garnered a great deal of attention from the rhetoric and composition/writing studies community since the Educational Testing Service began using e-rater^® and the Criterion^® Online Writing Evaluation Service as products in scoring writing tests, and most of the responses have been negative. While the criticisms leveled at AES are reasonable, the more important, underlying issues relate to the aspects of the writing construct of the tests AES can rate. Because these tests underrepresent the construct as it is understood by the writing community, such tests should not be used in writing assessment, whether for admissions, placement, formative, or achievement testing. Instead of continuing the traditional, large-scale, commercial testing enterprise associated with AES, we should look to well-established, institutionally contextualized forms of assessment as models that yield fuller, richer information about the student's control of the writing construct. Such tests would be more valid, as reliable, and far fairer to the test-takers, whose stakes are often quite high.     

‘If It Ain't True,Then It's Just a Book!’ The reading and teaching of faction literature

This article examines issues related to the reading and teaching of faction literature in school. Faction is defined not only as a literary genre but also as a form of reading applied to the reader. The article discusses young people's encounters with novels ‘based on a true story’ as well as the challenges this means for literature instruction. We also analyse the relationship between teachers' approach to faction literature in the classroom and syllabus formulations regarding appreciative forms of reading. The empirical material mainly consists of instances of teaching in the subject of Swedish from three upper secondary school classrooms. Our analysis suggests three areas in which the students' reading of faction becomes complicated in the way that the text's factual accuracy is often taken for granted. To meet these challenges a reflective literature instruction is required. We also demonstrate that the idea of literature mainly as a source of knowledge of life is strongly advocated in the syllabus.     

从元好问《论诗绝句三十首》等诗歌理论看论诗诗

中国古代诗歌十分繁荣,在发展至一定阶段之后产生了论诗诗,开创了以诗论诗的独特体式。试从论诗诗的源头谈起,探讨自杜甫《论诗六绝句》开创绝句论诗以降的论诗诗,并以元好问《论诗绝句三十首》为例,探讨论诗诗的创作、影响和局限。     

ALLEVIATING TRANSFER SHOCK: CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT FOR MORE SUCCESSFUL TRANSFER STUDENTS

Community college students transferring to a 4-year college or university face a variety of challenges. Social and academic issues can pose potential hurdles to graduating with a bachelor's degree for these students. Community colleges and 4-year institutions must work closely together to create more efficient and effective partnerships for students transitioning through the higher education system. This article makes suggestions for community college staff and faculty members to help transfer students successfully transition into university life and complete a bachelor's degree.     

Practicing masterful performance technology: Classic symphony or modern jazz

Senior performance technologists often take on real societal challenges, with enormous multilevel needs and minuscule funding. Front‐end assessment is conducted under demanding time frames with small teams. Successfully isolating critical gaps and formulating realistic solutions requires a melding of science and art. This article traces the author's journey to blend early military intelligence techniques with classical HPT methods—defining a craft approach to assessment likened to performance technology jazz.     

Moving Responses: Communication and Difference in Performative Pedagogies

During the 1990s an African American university band director brought together Rosa Parks and Mark Camphouse for a performance of Camphouse's composition, A Movement for Rosa. Teaching the composition, the conductor and Camphouse communicated with language describing musical and lived realities that student musicians attempted to express and reproduce through their performance. Engaging students substantively with issues of social justice was constrained, because pedagogy dependent on representational language confirms the common sense of what everyone knows, and installs the good sense stabilizing knowledge that tacitly discourages challenges or critiques. Communication that is performative, by contrast, enacts pedagogies that create partial, multiple, and contingent understandings, moving students' responses to action. Beginning with a discussion of the limitations of representational pedagogy using Briankle Chang's model of traditional communication theory, I propose applications of performative pedagogy through Della Pollock's characteristics of performative writing.     

On an Approach to Testing and Modeling Competence

E. L. Thorndike contributed significantly to the field of educational and psychological testing as well as more broadly to psychological studies in education. This article follows in his testing legacy. I address the escalating demand, across societal sectors, to measure individual and group competencies. In formulating an approach to measuring competence, I draw on measurement research I have done over my career; the Thorndike lecture is to be as much autobiographical as substantive and/or methodological. I present an approach to defining, measuring, and statistically modeling competency measurements. The article unpacks Hartig et al.'s (2008) definition of competence as a complex ability construct closely related to real-life-situated performance. The intent is to make the construct, competence, amenable to measurement. Once unpacked, criteria for building competence measurements are set forth and exemplified by research from business, military, and education sectors. Generalizability theory, a statistical theory for modeling and evaluating the dependability of competence scores, is applied to several of these examples. The article then pulls together the threads into a general competency measurement model and concludes by noting its limitations.     

Researching the Links between Education and Well-being

This article focuses on some of the conceptual and empirical issues relating to the links between education and well-being. Recent research has made progress in this area, despite the complexity and the limitations of available measurements and other observations. The first part discusses the ill-defined nature of education and the negative implications this has on research and policy. The second part outlines some of the major relationships that are being explored around the theme of education and well-being. This is not exhaustive but provides an overview of distinct theoretical explanations for the potential causal links. Reference is made to available evidence so as to provide an overview of what is known empirically about some of these possible explanations. The third section discusses some of the empirical limitations and challenges to building up a robust evidence base in this area.     

Changing Assessment — Towards a New Assessment Paradigm Using ICT

This article discusses how Information and Communication Technologies can support 21st century assessment strategies and what needs to be done to ensure that technological advances support and foster pedagogical innovation. Based on an extensive review of the literature, it provides an overview of current ICT-enabled assessment practices, with a particular focus on the more recent developments of ICT-enhanced assessment tools that recognise 21st century skills. The article also refers to relevant cases of eAssessment, looks into examples of the potential of emerging technologies for eAssessment and discusses some relevant innovation and policy issues. Reflecting on these examples, it argues that, although technological challenges exist, the more pressing task at present is to transcend the traditional testing paradigm and conceptually develop (e)Assessment strategies that allow to more fully exploit the benefits of emerging technologies in order to foster the development of 21^st century skills.     

The development of large-scale portfolio placement assessment at the University of Michigan: 1992–1998

The first section of this article examines in detail the mechanics of a large-scale writing portfolio assessment at the University of Michigan, including its impact on matriculation and placement; students' reactions to the requirement; and instructors' evaluation of the efficacy of placements under the new system. The second section of the article examines the scoring process used by readers to assess portfolios, describes its evolution over a 4-year period, and examines the results produced by various changes made to this process over time. The evolution of this portfolio placement assessment has not been traditional, in that it has enacted an understanding that people learn to read and write within specific social contexts, at the same time that it has enacted a commitment to connecting the intellectual and practical work of university teaching with the work of teaching that comes before it in the high schools. The assessment process also has enacted the authors' belief that issues of assessment are intimately linked to issues of curriculum and pedagogy; thus, the assessment has become an occasion for sustained talk about the purposes of our required writing courses, about the fit between our lower division and upper division writing requirements, and about the degree to which teachers share criteria for assessing students' writing within courses.     

Reading beneath the lines of children's stories

This paper is drawn from a study of 10-12 year-old children's stories, the specific purpose of which was to provide a means of investigating the influence of television and videos on children's imagination. Faced with the need to understand nearly 500 stories from their authors' points of view, that is interpreting the authors' meanings and intentions rather than constructing my own meaning as a reader, I found myself wondering how the 'reading' of these texts was to be undertaken. The paper describes the technique I devised for this task and what I found it could reveal about the subtlety, complexity and multiple meanings that can often be discovered in children's stories.The potential power of such an approach to reading children's writing raises issues about the assessment of school writing.