Using Rubrics (Bean) & Writing Assessment in the Early 21st Century (Yancey)

 Bean begins the article by discussing the subjectivity of evaluation criteria. He states, professional writing teachers grant that the assessment of writing like any art, involves subjective judgments. But the situation is not entirely relative either, for communal standards for good writing can be formulated and readers with different tastes can be trained to assess writing samples with surprisingly high correlation. To illustrate  this argument Bean brought up Diederich research on composition in which he discover that a diverse group of readers could be trained to increase the correlation of their grading. Bean wrote, by setting descriptions for high, middle, and low achievement in each of the five criterion areas ---idea, organization, sentence structure, wording, and flavor. Bean wrote that Diederich was able to train readers to balance their assessments over the 5 criteria. Bean further adds that since then many researchers have refined or refocused Diederich’s criteria and have developed strategies for training readers as evaluators and for displaying criteria to students in the form of rubrics.  Further in the article Bean went on to talk about the different type of rubric used and their importance to evaluation and the evaluator.

I agree with Bean that rubrics are important because they clarify for students qualities their work should have and I like that he value rubric, but he did not mention how little some teachers use rubric over time. Some teachers would develop a rubric for a particular assignment and project and at the end of that project or assignment that’s the end of that. The rubric is not reused or applied in different areas. I think rubrics should be designed for repeated use, or used on several tasks. Students should be given a rubric at the beginning of an instruction. Then they should complete the work, receive feedback, practice, revise or do another task, continue to practice, and ultimately receive a grade all using the same rubric. I think this reinforce learning more than anything.

In this article Yancey discuss writing assessment and how it has changed and varied across different time periods. She begins by describing the first wave of writing assessment in the early century. She wrote that “testes” what assessment were referred to at the time were indirect measures, that is a test that sampled something related to but other than the individual student’s writing typically a multiple choice test of editing skills serving as a proxy for writing. She added the most important question in this first wave of writing assessment was informed by an ideology located in a machine-like efficiency characterizing the early part of the century. “Which measure can do the best and fairest job of prediction with the least amount of work and the lowest cost?”

Yancey also discussed the second wave of writing assessments. She states that this wave dated back to the 70s and 80s was prompted by the explosion of interest in writing process and new pedagogies enacting the field’s new understandings of process. Due to these new understanding holistic scoring was developed. Yancey wrote that this type of assessment relied on a direct measure, or sample, of good writing by developing and using scoring guide that provided a reliability analogous to the reliability of indirect measures, holistic scoring was able to meet the standard of consistent scoring. She further wrote, the questions about assessment dominating this period were very different, then, than those driving the first wave: what roles have validity and reliability played in writing assessment? Who is authorized and who has the appropriate expertise to make the best judgements---teachers or experts?

Yancey further discussed the third wave of writing assessments as occurring from the late 1980s up until the turn of the century. She stated that this wave was characterized by attention to multiple texts, the ways we read those texts, and the role of students in helping us understand their texts and the processes they used to produce them. The vehicle for practicing assessment keyed to these principles was typically a portfolio of writing. Yancey defined as a set of texts selected from a larger archive and narrated, contextualized, and explained by the student himself---or herself. During this period of writing assessment the question one was asking, “Whose needs does writing assessment serve? And “how is it a political and social act?” Yancey also talks about the current moment in writing assessments, but I thought her explanation of writing assessments throughout the different periods was interesting. Yancey not only provide a historical component to her argument, but she also includes the important questions that were raised by shifts in writing assessments in accordance with their time period.