Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment : Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice

The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment.

Diane Kelly-Riley is Professor of English and Vice Provost for Faculty at the University of Idaho. She studies writing assessment theory and practice, validity theory, race and writing assessment, public humanities and multimodal composition. She was editor of the Journal of Writing Assessment from 2011-2022. She published Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment and the Aim of Fairness with Norbert Elliot (MLA, 2021).

Ti Macklin is the Director of First-Year Writing at Boise State University where she teaches courses in composition and rhetoric. Her research interests lie largely in First-Year Writing and writing assessment with a particular focus on assessment at the individual, classroom, and programmatic levels. Her most recent work examines the experiences of graduate and undergraduate students in first-year writing. She served on the editorial staff of the Journal of Writing Assessment for nine years.

Carl Whithaus is Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies the impact of information technology on literacy practices, writing assessment, and writing in the sciences and engineering. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning (Routledge, 2008) and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing (Erlbaum, 2005).