Naming this book has been quite an adventure. When the idea for its title and shape first came to mind, I originally thought to call it Reclaiming Assessment for the Teaching of Writing. Of course, as I thought through the title and reexamined the idea, I realized that to reclaim something meant that it had to be claimed in the first place. Unfortunately, writing assessment has never been claimed as a part of the teaching of writing. As far back as 1840, writing assessment was hailed as a better technology (chapter six contains a discussion of writing assessment as technology)...

It is becoming more and more clear to me that the work that I and others do in writing assessment, like work in other fields, is constrained, shaped and promoted by the overall shape of the field itself, yet writing assessment—as a field—has not been the object of inquiry for very much scholarship. There are several reasons for this, of course. Writing assessment researchers have been busy doing other things, mainly trying to establish procedures that could measure student ability in writing. Although research into the assessment of writing goes back to the early part of this century...

As Kathleen Yancey (1999) points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years. Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects that assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This chapter focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context; it looks at assessing, grading and testing writing, since when...

Many writing teachers and scholars feel frustrated by, cut off from, or otherwise uninterested in the subject of writing assessment, especially assessment that takes place outside of the classroom for purposes of placement, exit, or program evaluation. This distrust and estrangement are understandable, given the highly technical aspects of much discourse about writing assessment. For the most part, writing assessment has been developed, constructed, and privatized by the measurement community as a technological apparatus whose inner workings are known only to those with specialized knowledge. Consequently, English professionals have been made to feel inadequate and naive by considerations of technical...

Like chapter three, this chapter focuses on activities in the writing classroom and is concerned with the way our evaluation of and response to students’ writing affects their ability to learn. As I have in all the chapters in this volume, I start here with what we currently know or perceive about a specific component of assessing student writing and attempt to re-articulate it in ways that can further promote teaching and learning. My study of and ideas about response have been evolving over the last decade or so. For example, I regularly teach a doctoral seminar on writing assessment...

Several years ago, in an essay for a special issue in Computers and Composition on the electronic portfolio, I explored the ways in which technology had been applied to assessment, advocating that we use technology to link people together and to mediate responses to students rather than implement technology as a way to score student writing or respond to student writers. Writing that essay impressed upon me the ways in which technology had not only been applied to assessment, but how in many ways assessment had become a technology in and of itself. I later discovered that George Madhaus1 (1993)...

It might seem anticlimactic to conclude this book with a chapter on writing assessment practice, since the entire book has focused in some way or another on writing assessment practice, whether it be to emphasize its theoretical properties in chapter four, to talk about teaching assessment to student writers in chapter three, or to detail how to prepare new teachers to assess and respond to student writing in chapter five. By now, it should be clear I believe writing assessment theory is inextricably linked to its practice. Assessment is also linked to teaching, since it’s impossible to teach writing or...