Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Student Self Placement (SSP)

Abstract

Journal of Writing Assessment (JWA) has embraced the idea of Special Issues (SI) as a way of bringing together outstanding scholarship around a pressing issue for writing assessment researchers. As guest editors for this SI on student self placement (SSP), Kate L. Pantelides (Middle Tennessee State University) and Erin Whittig (University of Arizona) have not disappointed. In fact, they have brought together an engaging collection of eight articles that trace the dynamic conversations around SSP which are occurring at colleges and universities across North America. This SI is, perhaps, the largest single sustained work on self-placement since Dan Royer and Roger Gilles's (2003) Directed Self-Placement: Principles and Practices. In Pantelides and Whittig's (2024) introductory essay, "Placement Is Everyone's Business: A Love Letter to Our SSP Coalition, " they explain how SSP operates as an umbrella term for a variety of methods for placing students into college writing courses. They note that varieties of SSP can include guided self-placement (GSP), directed self-placement (DSP), and informed self-placement (ISP). All these techniques "include student choice as part of the mechanism. " And while there are many fellow travelers under the SSP umbrella, Pantelides and Whittig acknowledge that the similarities in nomenclature may actually obscure the wide range of practices that fall under these terms. This SI teases out those differences at the same time it develops theoretical approaches for placement and reports on empirical studies from multiple institutions. These data-driven articles wrestle with questions of ethics and student agency as well as fairness, predictive validity, and social justice; they also develop a nomenclature,