(Download) "Complex Adaptive Systems and Unconventional Progress for the National Air Quality Management System" by Writing Program Administration " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Complex Adaptive Systems and Unconventional Progress for the National Air Quality Management System
- Author : Writing Program Administration
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 78 KB
Description
The single most vexing issue that WPAs have to deal with is the endless writing assessments of students for program purposes, from placement of entering students to certification of graduating seniors. * This problem often blends into program assessment, another assessment issue of great importance for writing programs, and another topic about which most WPAs know little. In recent years, program assessment has received a good bit of specialized attention (see, for example, Haswell, Huot and Schendel, White, "The Rhetorical Problem"), so I will not deal with it here. Instead, I will focus on the testing of students for various other purposes beyond a single classroom. I intend to disentangle the concepts and conflicting practices that make this aspect of writing assessment particularly burdensome. While I have solutions to propose for some of these assessment problems, my principle goal is to clarify the issues that lie behind them, so they we can think clearly about the practices that make sense in our particular institutions. Society has given us a heavy responsibility. When we try to put entering students in the classes that will challenge them, yet allow them to succeed, we are acting as benign gatekeepers, but gatekeepers nonetheless. If students get in and through our first-year writing programs, the chances that they will graduate and share in the goods of our society are strong. If we--and they--fail to meet that challenge, many who might accomplish that goal drop out. And our responsibility is not only to our weakest writers; many of our most gifted students are likely to continue to believe that writing is a matter of error avoidance, not discovery, if we mishandle placement. It may be a losing struggle to keep doors open that are swinging shut for the less privileged, but it is our struggle to make--just as it is our job to keep reading and writing alive in the college curriculum for all students. This is the testing "in" of my title and I'll return to this matter in the second half of this article.
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