Assessment: Response #4

Long time, no blog. Here's something I wrote for my Assessment seminar last week, with the works cited at the end:

Narratives have a seductive power to them, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. Two of the articles this week (Gere and Harrington) are empirical studies and, thus, leavened with the flavor of objectivity, but digging underneath them reveals levels of materiality that never quite break out into the open. These are the things that catch my attention, in the same way that data visualizations like Gere’s brightly colored graphs might capture others. This is, in part, because I like stories; I’m in this business because of stories. It’s also in part because I think stories are what power change, and also resistance.

So I’m going to pull a classic humanistic/academic move and ignore the numbers for a moment, and instead contemplate the materiality of the spaces around them. (Sorry. I realize this is kind of a cop-out.) In a nod to methods, however, I should note that I wasn’t entirely clear in either case how the data itself was collected. It seems like that would be important—but we’re not talking about methods, necessarily.

What caught my attention in Gere’s study was the students who did not remember answering directed self-placement (DSP) questions at all, or didn’t know the difference between FYC and the practicum (162). This, in combination with the charts that illustrated the advisor’s recommendation as the most influential factor in a majority of cases, indicates that in DSP, the “directed” portion carries more weight than the “self.” DSP happens during the admissions/orientation/enrollment span of time, and from an administrative level, this often means a scramble to manage numbers, to hire contract instructors, or to make the next four years easier for balky students and/or their helicopter parents. “I am confident in my writing ability,” smacks of bluster to me, but I’m a writing snob by trade.

The Harrington article felt similar in nature to many of our previously read articles. Two factors from the article seemed fairly potentialized, without a lot of follow-through: FYC instructors were pleased with the placement and basic writing instructors were not, and that attendance was typically the reason that students failed either class, rather than any issue of difficulties with the course (65). The first point emphasizes, in my mind, a particular and troubling assumption that I’ve seen FYC instructors often make: that their students will be “good” writers, and any problematic writers are obviously “basic.” The second point should be troubling on an administrative level, rather than a strictly pedagogical one, because it seems that retention is dictated by outside (of FYC) influences, rather than any preparation, or lack thereof, on the students’ or instructors’ parts. Writing, it seems, usually has little to do with FYC courses.

References:

1. Gere, Anne Ruggles, et al. "Assessing the validity of self-directed self-placement at a large university." Assessing Writing 15 (2010): 154-176.
   
2. Harrington, Susanmarie. "New Visions of Authority in Placement Test Rating." WPA: Writing Program Administration 22.1-2 (1998): 53-84.