Doug, I've found the 1995 Position Statement on Assessment from CCCC to be
very helpful I think Kathleen Blake Yancey and Ed White were part of the
group that drafted it intially, if my memory is not failing me. Here's the
address:
http://www.ncte.org/about/over/positions/category/write/107610.htm
(I tried to send the whole thing, but CASLL rejected it as too long--even
though it isn't all that long. I do recommend it as a thoughtful overview
of the research on testing and writing assessment. And it's good to have a
position statement from a professional organization to show to administrators.)
Also, another good resource is Rich Haswell's Compile
(http://comppile.tamucc.edu/)--when I typed in "testing" and "assessment"
as keywords, I got 164 hits. Haswell has put together a large collection
of searchable materials in comp/rhet. The WPA conference on portfolio
assessment at Miami U in the early 90s generated some good work as well,
including a 1994 book on portfolio assessment (as opposed to mass
competency testing) and two papers on assessment (a dialogue on assessment,
really) by Ed White and Peter Elbow. I found the citation in Compile:
Black, Laurel; Donald A. Daiker; Jeffrey Sommers; Gail Stygall (Eds.), New
directions in portfolio assessment: Reflective practice, critical theory;
and large-scale scoring; Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1994.
The McGraw Hill Teaching Comp Website has a few interesting pieces on
assessment as well, including Rich Haswell's collection of student
responses to a mass writing assessment in Texas:
http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/haswell/Haswell_Module_final.htm
If you go to his piece, you can flip back to the list of previous topics
(there's another assessment module by Carol Rutz, and possibly a few
others). http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/english/tc/ is the address of the
website itself.
Your question about mass writing competence testing makes me think of
another one--is there much use of portfolio assessment on a large scale in
Canadian writing programs? I know it's costly in terms of time and money,
but the experience I had with a portfolio-based assessment in Oregon was
positive in terms of student learning and faculty development--we used it
for a few years to determine if students needed additional work on writing
after their first-year required writing course. Hope some of this is
useful. Best--Betsy
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