Right now, what has my attention is outcomes-based assessment at a very granular level, something I haven’t done for many years. Instead, what I’ve been doing is writing my assignments, including in them a brief list of criteria by which I expect to grade the students’ work, and then reading their work with those criteria in mind. In most semesters, though, I’ve been giving more As and Bs than I felt comfortable with; I haven’t felt that I’ve enacted my actual expectations when I’ve graded papers. It’s not that I feel I must grade on any semblance of a curve; it’s just that I don’t really think that the vast majority of students in my classes are writing at an A or B level.

So I’m really looking forward to experimenting with outcomes-based assessment, where all the criteria are built into the assignment and where it is the students’ accomplishments with those criteria that determine the grade for the assignment. I also just look forward to trying new things in my writing instruction.

McGraw already has the excellent WPA outcomes loaded into Connect as boilerplate from which instructors can work. Even though the Syracuse outcomes are very consonant with WPA, they are also framed differently; the Syracuse outcomes, for example, are very much oriented toward explicit rhetorical principles. They also pursue some objectives that are largely absent in the WPA outcomes. For the most part, these differences have to do with encouraging engagement with the research process and with the research sources. For Syracuse instructors, engagement as a desideratum comes in part from our collective reading and assessment of texts produced by our students; we found too many of those texts to be disappointingly lifeless and performative. The desire to encourage engagement also comes from the pilot and preliminary insights of the Citation Project: too many students are choosing brief, simplistic sources, are working at the sentence level in those sources, and are not pushing beyond the first two pages of the source.

Because I’m a pilot teacher for these new outcomes at my own university, I’m setting up my course on Connect with custom outcomes derived directly from the Syracuse objectives. I don’t have a ready way of embedding those in this post, but I can provide a PDF if you’re interested in seeing my first draft. I welcome suggestions and would especially like to hear from people who have tried this sort of assessment system. The spring should be interesting!

Itsa gonna be fun.

Part of the fun is that I won’t be bringing any special expertise to the topic. I do have an interest in privacy issues just now–I don’t think I know anyone who, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t. I’ve been reading a bit about it, pretty much every day, things brought to my attention mostly through the not-so-random venue of Twitter. The topic was picked, though, by some of the students who will be in the course, students who are right now in my Comp 1 and are signing up for my Comp 2. After class on the last day of classes this week, I asked them to talk with me for a few minutes. I told them about the possible topics of inquiry that I was considering for the spring course, and I explained why I thought each of those possibilities was (or at least could be) important, interesting, or both. (Over on Facebook, Bob says he can guess what choices of topics I gave them: “plagiarism, plagiarism, or privacy.”) They listened, asked questions. Then I asked them which of the topics they wanted for the umbrella topic of inquiry in my spring course. They enthusiastically chose privacy, a little for its inevitable attention to social media (along with Google Earth and GPS technologies), but overwhelmingly because of their interest in Wikileaks. Some had heard about it; others hadn’t; all wanted to know more. Now, if you’re one of the students-as-ignorant-scum intellectuals (and surely we all are or have been, at one time or another, to one degree or another), you will find proof here that students are contemptible ignoramuses. (“HOW could they not know about Wikileaks!”) Yet you might also, if you allow yourself to, admire the intellectual curiosity that prompted all these students to be fascinated by this new phenomenon that was unfolding as a global issue, this phenomenon that seemed important and complex. Right there, at that moment, my students and I held a quick exchange about the mindboggling principle arising from hactivism (a term I had learned just a few days earlier, on Facebook, from Joyce I think): that with hactivism there is no “us” and “them”; we all win and lose simultaneously in the struggle over governments’ rights to privacy confidentiality, and none of us in this conversation has agency or even knowledge of the terms and methods of this battle.

I asked my students to pick the topic of inquiry for the course because I thought they would enjoy having some agency in the decision. (I had to limit the choices to things I thought were (a) worthwhile–it’s my job to make that judgment–and (b) teachable by me.) I also thought it would be an easier course to teach if a quarter of its denizens had already bought into the topic of inquiry. I also thought it would be a more interesting course to take if its topic of inquiry were one which a quarter of the students had declared worthy. And I also just plain wanted to know what my students’ ideas and interests were. As this semester has unfolded, I have not only been wonderfully jumpstarted as a teacher by the fantastic group of students in my section of Comp 1, but I have also come to have an interest in the individuals in the class, have come to regard them as people from whom I can learn.

More about that in another post. As I begin drafting that Nuther Post, I’m taking a deep breath, holding my nose, and reading the current scholarship on the decline of education, the decline of literacy, and the demise of civilization precipitated by what are described as the immoral, illiterate, internet-poisoned, unteachable arrogant louts in our classrooms. The Nuther Post will be along soon, I suspect, because it’s something I feel quite compelled to write about at last. I’ve been in such a lather just to pen this preliminary post (while simultaneously beginning the drafting of the Nuther Post) that I’m sitting in a dark room with all the blinds still up: I haven’t taken the time to turn on the lights and lower the blinds. And my fingers and nose are freezing: I haven’t taken the time to get up and turn the heat up in this popsicle box. My stalwart companion, Miss Teakettle, has several times been compelled to trudge back and forth across my keyboard, yowling for my attention. Given how much I think about this topic–the topic of how instructors represent their students–and how much I talk about it with the Beloved Partner, students, and friends, though, it was high time for me to begin committing pieces of it to public writing.

P.S. To demonstrate the ubiquity of that course theme of privacy: I was challenged, as I wrote this, for how to represent conversations that take place on Facebook. Those are to me private conversations, taking place in most cases between people who have each chosen to be my FBF. I don’t want to violate the boundaries of that relationship. Yet I do want to disclose, at least to some extent, the way not only my course but my thinking is being crowdsourced, in a wide range of venues. So I compromised by just using first names. That way other FB friends will know who I’m talking about and what conversation I’m referencing, and my FB friends’ privacy won’t be violated, because my readers here who aren’t FB friends won’t be sure who “Bob” and “Joyce” are. I’m not happy with any of my citational choices here, but this seems to me best (or only most self-serving?) of the choices I can come up with. Carrying on a conversation across technologies means that citation might not be so much “crediting” my sources as violating their privacy. Given that this post “feeds” to Twitter thence to Facebook, at least my friends will know that I’ve cited/outed them. You see what I mean about the ubiquity of complex privacy issues in contemporary culture? Itsa gonna be lotsa fun.

And now I read the arguments they made on a different topic. The class collaboratively chose their own topics for this argument paper, deriving their choices from the readings we’d been doing in class. One group chose to explore the question “Is the internet making us smarter?”

I’ve read four of the papers from that group so far, and guess what. Two of the four have brought up the fears from prior literacy revolutions and speak about those revolutions with a fair amount of clarity, accuracy, and authority. There’s no textual evidence that they researched the issue; it appears that they simply were listening to what I was saying, taking it in, remembering it, and thinking it relevant to the course inquiry.

Which puts me in the humbling position of being reminded that my students, even though they may not be performing for me, may be listening to what I’m saying, making meaning of it, and making use of it.

Thursday, April 7:

1:45-3:00
C34, “The Citation Project: Results of a 16-College Study of Students’ Use of Sources.”
Chair: Chris Anson
Rebecca Moore Howard, “The Background: Why We Need Data-Driven Research to Understand Plagiarism”
Sandra Jamieson, “A Statistical Profile of 160 Students’ Researched Writing, with Implications for Teaching.”

3:15-4:30
D36, “Citation Context Analysis: Fresh Approaches to Assessment and Tutoring.”
Chair: Rebecca Moore Howard
Trisha Serviss, “Unveiling the Wizards of Writing Assessment: Methods for Revising the Premises and Practices of Assessment”
Bess Fox, “Citation Analysis in an Institutional Assessment of Information Literacy: Measuring Student Engagement with Source Material”
Elizabeth Kleinfeld, “Beyond “Gotcha” in the Writing Center: Using Citation Analysis in Tutorials.”

Saturday, April 9:

11:00-12:15: We have two sessions in this time slot! Folks will have to choose between them:

M05, “Taking the Citation Project Back into History and Across the Curriculum”
Chair: Kelly Kinney
Nancy Barry, “Before Research Went Electronic: How Did Students Use Sources?”
Brock MacDonald, “Citation Practices and Disciplinary Acculturation: Learning to Write Research Papers in Geography”
Tanya Rodrigue, “Students’ Use of Sources in Classes across the Curriculum”

M06, “Fresh Perspectives on Plagiarism and Responsibility”
Chair: Sandra Jamieson
Crystal Benedicks, “Who Cares?”: Academic Integrity Policy and Other Sacred Texts”
Missy Watson, “Contesting the Scholarship on Plagiarism: An Inquiry into Research Methods and Methodologies”
Kristi Murray Costello, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: How FYC Fosters Irresponsible Source Use”
Kathryn Navickas, “Civil Disobedience: How FYC Fosters Civic Irresponsibility”

See you in Atlanta!

I will be making handbook assignments, though. I’ll be dividing up the material I want them to engage, and assigning groups of students in the class to study specific parts of it and teach it to the rest of the class. On Tuesday, let’s say, one group gets section 8a; another, 8b; another, 8c; and another, 8d. On Thursday they come into class and I put them into groups with the others who read their section. That group gets about 10 minutes’ planning time, and then they stand up and teach the material to the rest of the class. It’s true that this way, each student actually reads only one section of chapter 8. But at least they do really read and really understand that section. And when their group’s presentation ends, I ask the rest of the class to repeat what they just heard. If the class can’t say what they were just taught, the group does it again. This way the group not only really learns their material, but the class really listens to them, asks questions, and comes to understand the material, too.

This all works best, of course, if it’s anchored in a paper that the students are working on. I’ll talk about that in a separate post.

1. Many writers would rather have a root canal than consult a handbook. I’ve been teaching writing for 31 years, always using a handbook for composition class. How many times have I said to the class, “Bring your handbooks tomorrow,” and maybe a third of them do. Then I say, gamely, “Open your handbook to page 37.” About ten percent of those who have the handbook with them simply sit there, without opening it!

2. Many successful writers consult a handbook regularly. Most of you do, I’m betting. I do.

3. Few inexperienced writers know how to use a handbook. See #1 above. They not only don’t know how to use it, they don’t think they can or don’t think it’s worth their while to. Today I listened to a first-time TA say, “How can I ever find anything in this handbook?” She asked this while waving the book. The closed book. Others at her table opened the book and showed her how to use the index at the beginning and end of it. “Inexperienced writers” doesn’t just mean first-year composition students; it can also mean “experienced writers who aren’t experienced with the whole range of writing tools.” A closed handbook is of very little use to a writer.

4. Teaching the use of a handbook imparts a lifelong writing skill. The Purdue Owl is great, and it’s one of many excellent online resources. But a good handbook provides more than rules; it provides discussions, perspectives, contexts, explanations. It sets a tone that says, “There’s a lot you need to know about writing, and you can get there.” And if you know how to use a handbook and you don’t sell it back for a lousy ten bucks, you always have a place to turn for answers and options.

5. Making students use a handbook is not the same as teaching them how to use it on their own. Assigning exercises or readings in a handbook may get students to open the book, and it may familiarize them with the particular principles in that assignment. But it doesn’t necessarily teach them how to use it. (As soon as I can, I’ll post a list of pedagogical techniques that I use in my own classes for doing that very thing.)

6. Students may be more willing to use a handbook when they see it as a dialogic tool, not a repository of sovereign rules. See #4 above. Having something that does convey rules is very useful, indeed. But college composition students may be put off by what they see as restrictive rules. More students may be receptive to it when the handbook acts as a coach, makes it clear that what is “right” depends on what Edbauer (see #7 below) calls the “affective ecology,” and brings the users into the decision-making process rather than making them recipients and performers of other people’s decisions.

7. Using audience and purpose as the basis of handbook use can help students understand why the contents of the handbook matter. To me, one of the most horrifying things about too many handbooks (at least those of my pedagogical past–I’m hoping not so many today) is the presentation of rules as transcendent and immutable. Every “rule” of writing is, in contrast, dependent upon its rhetorical situation. (And for a terrific treatment of rhetorical situation, see Jenny Edbauer’s “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” in the 2005 Rhetoric Society Quarterly.) Edbauer complicates the notions of audience and purpose–and the larger category of rhetorical situation–in productive ways. A handbook can’t do what Edbauer does; handbooks and scholarly articles are different genres. But it’s enormously useful for instructors to use handbooks to introduce composition students to rhetorical concepts and for those instructors themselves to have the more sophisticated understanding that scholarship like Edbauer’s generates.

8. Handbooks are most useful (and most often used) when writers engage them in a spirit of curiosity, exploration, and dialogue–not because their instructor told them they’d made an error and the handbook would tell them how to fix it. Though error-fixing is a fine thing, it doesn’t pull students toward the craft of writing. Curiosity, exploration, and dialogue do, and writers’ experience of those traits can be extended to their use of handbooks.

9. Adopting a common handbook for all sections of composition (and literature, linguistics, rhetoric?) emphasizes the importance of the book and encourages students to keep it rather than sell it back. There are pros and cons to this principle. It’s true that handbooks are different from each other. (If you’re hearing people saying, “They’re all the same,” you’re listening to people who aren’t looking beyond the general organization. Look at tone, depth, and range of presentation, and you’ll find a lot of variety. You may even find that some are much more carefully written and edited than are others.) Given their difference from each other, some handbooks are going to suit certain teaching styles better than others. It’s true, too, that instructors become familiar with a particular handbook, like a particular handbook, and take it pretty hard when administration insists on their using a different one. I’ve also had the experience of being in a program that mass-adopted a handbook for reasons other than the quality of the handbook, and we teachers were stuck with a dog. But with all this said, I think the balance is in favor of mass adoption. First, students shouldn’t have the expense of buying two different handbooks, one for Comp 1 and another for Comp 2. Ours is not an economy in which such practices are tolerable. Second, if students are having to buy one handbook after another, they learn that a handbook is better sold than treasured. Third, a handbook adoption shouldn’t be an empty gesture; it should signify the instructors’ intention to engage it seriously in the classroom. When all the instructors are using the same handbook, the writing program has the possibility of sharing pedagogical tips and techniques related to the handbook that they have chosen.

10. Persuading other departments to adopt the handbook in their courses—even just as a “recommended” text—further emphasizes to students the importance of the book. We did this when I was the WPA at TCU. The English department made a mass handbook adoption, and then I wrote to every department chair, informing them of our decision and suggesting that they might want to list the handbook as at least a recommended text on their own syllabi, as a way of emphasizing its importance and encouraging students to use it. Then the publisher’s representative sent an exam copy to every department chair. It wasn’t long before a healthy number of courses across the curriculum had that handbook on their syllabus. I was especially pleased when a dance instructor adopted it!

Trained in literature departments for the humanistic interpretation of texts, we had a lot to learn. Some of it we learned by direct instruction and some by studying methodological texts. The rest we learn as we go along, through trial and error.

Now we’ve gathered thousands of student texts from 16 U.S. colleges. (Our website says 15, but as soon as we can catch our breath, we need to update it; a 16th college came on board this summer, bringing their own researchers with them!) This summer a whole team of people is finding sources, reading student papers and their sources, and coding the relationships between the students’ citations and the sources they cite. That’s the fieldwork. We have a small grant that allows us to pay a few graduate students this summer, but for most of us this is volunteer work, scholarship to which we feel ineluctably drawn.

Sandra Jamieson and I are tracking, compiling, processing, and analyzing the results of the fieldwork. That’s the lab work. The first three of these–tracking, compiling, and processing–are my job this summer. And it *is* drudgery! I am amazed by how many hours and how much concentration it takes to do this “lab” work.

Yet it is exciting drudgery. As the movement of data among researchers is tracked, marked-up papers are PDFed and stored in accessible online folders, and spreadsheets are assembled with data for the SPSS database, I unavoidably feel excited. We are moving toward a goal, and the goal is one that we all count as very important. We expect to produce the kind of results that can profoundly aid teachers and curriculum-builders. We are too much in the throes of the fieldwork and lab work right now to see that light ahead of us, but we know it’s there. And it keeps me moving through “the drudgery of the lab.” Now I have a better understanding of how scientists are motivated, and why they find their work rewarding.

Feeding on a culture-wide fear of uncontrolled, incomprehensible technology run amok, and encouraging a suspicion of, a disdain for, even a hatred of students, these stories do us no good at all. Instead, they encourage us to use automated assessment of writing and to cease assigning out-of-class writing. Such measures will indeed assuage our fear that we are being duped by our students: how can they dupe us if we’re expecting, asking, so very little of them?

I try to keep my expectations high for my students. I try to work with them as they write, helping them expand their thinking and open their minds about the topic they’ve chosen (or that I’ve assigned). How can I do that work if I’m only assigning in-class writing? I recognize–because I experience it myself–that teachers’ workloads are rising exponentially, making it ever harder for us to do what we once considered minimally acceptable quality of teaching. That does not, however, mean that it’s game over for us. Yet the New York Times, and all those other media outlets recycling sensationalistic old stories to fill a page and sell copy, are telling us that precise thing. They are selling despair.

I’m tired of reading these stories. None of them has anything new to add to the old script, except that each one uses a new, local example. In the case of “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name),” the “new, local example” is the testimony of a friend of the writer, someone who claims that plagiarism is “turning him into a cop.” Notice that it’s the plagiarism that’s the agent here; the teacher is the hapless, pitiable victim. And in the case of “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery,” the new, local example is the testing center at the University of Central Florida, which the writer, incredibly, describes as “the frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating.” We are cops, we are locked in battle, we are in a dangerous place known as a frontier.

We can do better than this, my friends. And so can the New York Times.

One thing I’m hearing is debates about the value of *not* adopting a handbook in writing courses, on the premise that students can find answers to questions about grammar and documentation online. That’s a great idea.

But it’s a great idea, I believe, only for students who know what the questions are and who are motivated to find answers to them. That would certainly describe most graduate students, advanced undergraduates, English majors, and the like. It wouldn’t actually describe me; I still turn to authoritative hardcopy references (which now include my own handbook!) for such information. But I recognize and respect that it describes many others.

Those “many others” do not, for the most part, include my own students in first-year comp. For most of them, writing is an empty ceremony that they reluctantly perform on the command of their instructors. They work hard at figuring out what the instructor wants and how to deliver it with the least effort. In saying that, I am not disparaging my very earnest and likable students; I’m just saying that their goals in a college classroom are different from mine. It’s my job to figure out how to bridge the gap. Expecting or demanding that they go online to find answers to arcane questions that they do not themselves care about or fully understand seems to me a form of denying the gap rather than bridging it.

For me, bridging the gap means not only adopting a hardcopy handbook but using it in class. After the end of the term, my students will no longer have regular access to me when they write, and they will no longer have me to motivate them to care. What they will still have, if I’ve done my job well, is a handbook that they feel comfortable with and that they won’t sell back for a lousy ten bucks at the end of the term.

So bridging the gap means I have my students buy a hardcopy handbook, bring it to class, and use it in class in a variety of ways. They get comfortable with it, they come to value it, they keep it, they use it. That’s the goal. And that seems to me a very responsible thing for me to do. It may cost my students some money, but if I’ve chosen the book well, for its price and for its quality, I have done them the great favor of educating them, getting them more involved in writing, moving them toward being confident writers, and providing them with an ongoing writing tutor (the handbook) that I have used my writerly expertise to choose with care.

Clearly, then, one of the tasks for writing instruction is to help students find good reference sources. Many instructors excoriate Wikipedia as a poor research source. What we should not lose sight of, though, is the problems of other general reference sources. The Encyclopedia Brittanica is a fine collection, but it offers only the most rudimentary introduction to a topic. Our students will benefit enormously if they learn how to search their library’s online and physical holdings for specialized reference sources such as the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition or the Dictionary of Classical Mythology–sources that treat the topic in greater depth and that may also overview the debates about the topic.

Our early insights from the Citation Project research prompt me, as a teacher, to be much more energetic and specific with my students about why reference sources must be the beginning, not the objective, of critical research; otherwise, they may be dooming themselves to patchwritten, flimsy arguments.