Race and Writing Assessment (Studies in Composition and Rhetoric)

Race and Writing Assessment brings together established and up-and-coming scholars in composition studies to explore how writing assessment needs to change in order to account for the increasing diversity of students in college classrooms today. Contributors identify where we have ignored race in our writing assessment approaches and explore issues related to assessment technologies, faculty and student responses to assessment, institutional responses to writing assessment, and contexts for assessing writing beyond composition programs. Balancing practical advice and theoretical discussions, Race and Writing Assessment provides a variety of models, frameworks, and research methods to consider writing assessment approaches that are sensitive to the linguistic and cultural identities that diverse students bring to writing classrooms. This book illustrates that there is no one-size-fits-all model for addressing diversity in assessment practices but that assessment practices attuned to racial diversity must be rooted in the contexts in which they are found. In doing so, Race and Writing Assessment enriches contemporary research on contextualized approaches to writing assessment.

Asao B. Inoue received his Ph.D. from Washington State University. He is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at California State University, Fresno, the Special Assistant to the Provost on Writing Across the Curriculum, and the First Year Writing Program Assessment Coordinator. Dr. Inoue has published articles on validity theory, writing assessment, and directed self-placement in The Journal of Writing Assessment, Assessing Writing, and Composition Forum as well as in numerous collections. Mya Poe received her Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts. She is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University. Prior to coming to Penn State, she was Director of Technical Communication at MIT. She is the co-author of Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering: Case Studies from MIT (with Neal Lerner and Jennifer Craig, 2010). Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Along with Tom Deans, she is editor of the Oxford University Press Short Guides to Writing in the Disciplines series.