McLeod, Susan, Heather Horn, and Richard H. Haswell. "Accelerated Classes and the Writers at the Bottom: A Local Assessment Story." CCC 56.4 (2005): 556-80.

Abstract

Assessment, including writing assessment, is a form of social action. Because standardized tests can be used to reify the social order, local assessments that take into account specific contexts are more likely to yield useful information about student writers. This essay describes one such study, a multiple-measure comparison of accelerated summer courses with nonaccelerated courses. We began with the assumption that the accelerated courses would probably not be as effective as the longer courses; but our assessment found that assumption largely to be incorrect. Contextual information made it clear that students were taking summer accelerated courses strategically, for reasons we had been unaware of and in ways that forced us to reinterpret their writing and our courses.

White, Edward M. "The Scoring of Writing Portfolios: Phase 2." CCC 56.4 (2005): 581-600.

Abstract

Although most portfolio evaluation currently uses some adaptation of holistic scoring, the problems with scoring portfolios holistically are many, much more than for essays, and the problems are not readily resolvable. Indeed, many aspects of holistic scoring work against the principles behind portfolio assessment. We have from the start needed a scoring methodology that responds to and reflects the nature of portfolios, not merely an adaptation of essay scoring. I here propose a means for scoring portfolios that allows for relatively efficient grading where portfolio scores are needed and where time and money are in short supply. It is derived conceptually from portfolio theory rather than essay-testing theory and supports the key principle behind portfolios, that students should be involved with reflection about and assessment of their own work. It is time for the central role that reflective writing can play in portfolio scoring to be put into practice.

Ritter, Kelly. "The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition." CCC 56.4 (2005): 601-31.

Abstract

Using sample student analyses of online paper mill Web sites, student survey responses, and existing scholarship on plagiarism, authorship, and intellectual property, this article examines how the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale, and why such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites.

You, Xiaoye. "Ideology, Textbooks, and the Rhetoric of Production in China." CCC 56.4 (2005): 632-53.

Abstract

This article examines a writing textbook published in the People's Republic of China over two editions. I will argue that competing ideologies have constantly and in multifold manners dictated the ways this textbook was produced, disseminated, consumed, and reproduced: the rhetoric for a textbook's production and existence.

Fulkerson, Richard. "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century." CCC 56.4 (2005): 654-87.

Abstract

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for "the" academic discourse community.

Miller, Susan. "Review Essay: The Evidence of Our Sensibilities." CCC 56.4 (2005): 688-700.

No abstract available.