On this topic, the November, 2000 issue of Research in the Teaching of
English will include Pulling Your Hair Out:Crises of Standardization in
Communal Writing Assessment by Bob Broad. As the title suggests, it's not a
chorus-of-applause study. I'll paste in the abstract below. Peter
Instructors and administrators in the portfolio program at City University
urgently desired to standardize their evaluations of students' writing to
make their judgments quick, easy, and homogeneous. Because they refused to
compromise the rhetorical and pedagogical integrity of their decisions,
participants in this study found that evaluative ambiguity and conflict
stubbornly remained. Though extremely frustrating for the writing faculty
involved, the evaluative crises they experienced set the stage for a
radical reconceptualization of the process of standardization. In fact,
their struggles delivered communal writing assessment to the doorstep of
hermeneutic standardization, a paradigm that can accommodate both of
writing assessment's historically antagonistic commitments: to fairness and
consistency and to the diversity, complexity, and context dependence that
are characteristic of rhetorical experience. Using qualitative methods to
analyze observation- and interview-based data as well as written documents,
I explore how City University's writing instructors grappled with their
crises of standardization. Participants experienced multiple breakdowns in
the project of standardization, of which this article details the 2 most
severe: crises of textual representation and crises of evaluative
subjectivity. I conclude by examining conflicting
interpretations--psychometric and hermeneutic--of City University's crises.
In advocating the second interpretation, I argue that viewing City
University's struggles through a hermeneutic lens can lead to revised
understandings and practices that allow teachers of composition to honor
more fully their theoretical, pedagogical, and ethical commitments when
judging students' writing.
At 07:49 PM 9/21/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Hello XMCA.
>I recall some time ago a brief but nicely balanced discussion of portfolio
>assessment that differed from the chorus-of-applause that seems to
>characterize most of the literature on this topic. If anyone can point me
>toward that discussion thread, or to other thoughtful analyses of portfolio
>assessment, that would be greatly appreciated. Rather than clutter up the
>current interesting threads, please reply off-line to me. I'll post a
>synthesis of the responses to the list, in case others are interested.
>Thanks.
>David Kirshner
>Louisiana State University
>dkirsh@lsu.edu
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