Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment, and the Aim of Fairness

Students thrive when they are exposed to a variety of disciplinary genres, and their lives―and our institutions―are enriched by improving their writing outcomes. Taking account of evolving research, writing in the disciplines, and demographic and institutional shifts in higher education, this volume imagines new ways to improve writing outcomes by broadening the focus of assessment to wider issues of humanity and society.

The essays―by contributors from diverse fields, from writing studies to nursing, engineering, and architecture―demonstrate innovative classroom practices and curricular design that place fairness and the situatedness of language at the center of writing instruction. Contributors reflect on a wide range of examples, from a disability-as-insight model to reckoning with postcolonial legacies, and the essays consider a variety of institutions, classrooms, and types of assessment, including culturally responsive assessment and peer feedback in digital environments.