Reclaiming Accountability: Improving Writing Programs through Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessments - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607324342 ISBN 13: 9781607324348

Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Reclaiming Accountability brings together a series of critical case studies of writing programs that have planned, implemented, and/or assessed the impact of large-scale accreditation-supported initiatives. The book reimagines accreditation as a way to leverage institutional or programmatic change.

Contributions to the volume are divided into three parts. Part 1 considers how specialists in composition and rhetoric can work most productively with accrediting bodies to design assessments and initiatives that meet requirements while also helping those agencies to better understand how writing develops and how it can most effectively be assessed. Parts 2 and 3 present case studies of how institutions have used ongoing accreditation and assessment imperatives to meet student learning needs through programmatic changes and faculty development. They provide concrete examples of productive curricular (part 2) and instructional (part 3) changes that can follow from accreditation mandates while providing guidance for navigating challenges and pitfalls that WPAs may encounter within shifting and often volatile local, regional, and national contexts.

In addition to providing examples of how others in the profession might approach such work, Reclaiming Accountability addresses assessment requirements beyond those in the writing program itself. It will be of interest to department heads, administrators, writing program directors, and those involved with writing teacher education, among others.

Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, William P. Banks, Remica Bingham-Risher, Melanie Burdick, Polina Chemishanova, Malkiel Choseed, Kyle Christiansen, Angela Crow, Maggie Debelius, Michelle F. Eble, Jonathan Elmore, Lorna Gonzalez, Angela Green, Jim Henry, Ryan Hoover, Rebecca Ingalls, Cynthia Miecznikowski, Susan Miller-Cochran, Cindy Moore, Tracy Ann Morse, Joyce Magnotto Neff, Karen Nulton, Peggy O'Neill, Jessica Parker, Mary Rist, Rochelle Rodrigo, Tulora Roeckers, Shirley K. Rose, Iris M. Saltiel, Wendy Sharer, Terri Van Sickle, Jane Chapman Vigil, David M. Weed

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wendy Sharer, Tracy Ann Morse, Michelle F. Eble, and William P. Banks are writing faculty at East Carolina University. When their program faced reaccreditation in 2013, they chose to address the process as an opportunity to garner institutional support for revisions to their composition and writing across the curriculum programs.

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Reclaiming Accountability

Improving Writing Programs Through Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessments

By Wendy Sharer, Tracy Ann Morse, Michelle F. Eble, William P. Banks

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-434-8

Contents

Introduction: Accreditation and Assessment as Opportunity Wendy Sharer, Tracy Ann Morse, Michelle F. Eble, and William P. Banks, 
PART ONE: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS — EDUCATING AND LEARNING FROM ACCREDITING BODIES, 
1 Assessing for Learning in an Age of Comparability: Remembering the Importance of Context Cindy Moore, Peggy O'neill, and Angela Crow, 
2 QEP Evaluation as Opportunity: Teaching and Learning through the Accreditation Process Susan Miller-Cochran and Rochelle Rodrigo, 
3 Understanding Accreditation's History and Role in Higher Education: How It Matters to College Writing Programs Shirley K. Rose, 
PART TWO: CURRICULUM AND PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT THROUGH ASSESSMENT AND ACCREDITATION, 
4 Going All In: Creating a Community College Writing Program through the QEP and Reaccreditation Process Jonathan Elmore and Teressa Van Sickle, 
5 Moving Forward: What General Studies Assessment Taught Us about Writing, Instruction, and Student Learning Jessica Parker and Jane Chapman Vigil, 
6 Making Peace with a "Regrettable Necessity": Composition Instructors Negotiate Curricular Standardization David Weed, Tulora Roeckers, and Melanie Burdick, 
7 A Tool for Program Building: Programmatic Assessment and the English Department at Onondaga Community College Malkiel Choseed, 
8 Centering and De-Centering Assessment: Accountability, Accreditation, and Expertise Karen Nulton and Rebecca Ingalls, 
9 Using Accountability to Garner Writing Program Resources, Support Emerging Writing Researchers, and Enhance Program Visibility: Implementing the UH Writing Mentors during WASC Reaccreditation Jim Henry, 
10 SEUFolios: A Tool for Using ePortfolios as Both Departmental Assessment and Multimodal Pedagogy Ryan S. Hoover and Mary Rist, 
PART THREE: FACULTY DEVELOPMENT THROUGH ASSESSMENT AND ACCREDITATION, 
11 Write to the Top: How One Regional University Made Writing Everybody's Business Polina Chemishanova and Cynthia Miecznikowski, 
12 "Everybody Writes": Accreditation-Based Assessment as Professional Development at a Research Intensive University Linda Adler-Kassner and Lorna Gonzalez, 
13 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Assessment: Lessons from a Thresholds-Based Approach Maggie Debelius, 
14 Faculty Learning Outcomes: The Impact of QEP Workshops on Faculty Beliefs and Practices Joyce Neff and Remica Bingham-Risher, 
15 From the Outside In: Creating a Culture of Writing through a QEP Angela Green, Iris Saltiel, and Kyle Christiansen, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Assessing for Learning in an Age of Comparability

Remembering the Importance of Context

CINDY MOORE, PEGGY O'NEILL, AND ANGELA CROW

As compositionists attempt to navigate the ever-changing landscape of contemporary higher education accreditation, we can draw on our rich history of using external assessment mandates to our advantage. Given recent calls for more standardized assessment methods, and developments in processing, sharing, and analyzing big data sets based on those standardized methods, it is imperative that we work with accreditors, employing our expertise, as we have in the past, to develop approaches to assessing students and teachers that improve learning and are consistent with our disciplinary theories about writing, teaching, and assessment. Below, we review compositionists' responses to earlier assessment mandates and illustrate how a knowledge of such work can help current program administrators and faculty negotiate an accreditation context increasingly influenced by public calls for higher ed accountability and the new technologies that offer a means to achieve it.

Learning from the Past: Writing Assessment and Accountability in Context

Because of the consequences of assessment for both teaching and learning, writing administrators and faculty have, for decades, seen externally inspired writing assessment initiatives as opportunities to document student achievement, gather information about program strengths and challenges, and use that information to improve curriculum and instruction. The literature in our field is replete with articles and books that illustrate our willingness — and ability — to make assessment mandates serve our more specific interests while also satisfying requirements imposed by state legislators and accreditors.

During the mid- to late-twentieth century as the college-bound student population diversified, calls for writing placement and proficiency tests increased, and composition faculty became more involved in writing assessment. Understanding "the sociopolitical implications of these tests for students and teachers" (Greenberg 1982, 743), many compositionists worked throughout the 1970s and 1980s to ensure that externally imposed writing assessments were informed by current theory and research and served the needs of their particular students (Cooper and Odell 1977; Gere 1980; Greenberg 1982;White 1984). For example, one study investigated "the effect of different kinds of testing upon the distribution of scores for racial minorities" (White and Thomas 1981, 276), examining the consequences of a standardized multiple-choice test of usage and a local exam designed by California State University faculty in conjunction with testing experts. The study showed that scores for white students were similar for the standardized exam and the essay portion of the CSU exam, but the results for black and Latino students were quite different: the standardized multiple-choice exam "rendered a much more negative judgment of these students' use of English than did the evaluators of their writing" (1981, 281). White and Thomas argued that the results cast "some real question upon the validity of usage testing as an indicator of writing ability" (1981, 280).

Through research such as this, writing scholars realized the power of assessments to influence teaching and learning and wanted to minimize the chances that "writing teachers [would] find themselves administering writing proficiency tests that [bore] little relationship to their perception of college-level writing ability" and that administrators would use "the results of a test they consider inadequate or inappropriate" for placement or promotion" (Greenberg 1982, 367). While such efforts were not directly linked to accreditation demands, they highlighted the importance of balancing the needs of a particular local context with outside interests, for example, university administrators or policymakers (Greenberg 1982).

In the 1980s, one of the most influential responses to an external assessment mandate was the portfolio assessment system developed by Pat Belanoff and Peter Elbow to replace a university mandated proficiency exam. Belanoff and Elbow (1986) argued that the portfolio assessment, which involved teachers working in groups for norming during the semester and then at the end for the formal portfolio evaluation, promoted better teaching and more learning because, in part, the teachers developed shared evaluation criteria and the group discussions informed their work with students in their classrooms. Theportfolio program Belanoff and Elbow designed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Univ of Chicago behalf of UP Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607324342
• ISBN 13: 9781607324348
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 342
• Herausgeber: Sharer Wendy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland