The worship of efficiency: Untangling theoretical and practical considerations in writing assessment

Chapter 1. Writing Studios and Change

“…There are many stories about education that Studio must contend with, but we will focus on the pervasive educational narrative of efficiency that we argue most impacts studio work at both public and private institutions. Efficiency, according to Williamson (1994), is rooted in the capitalist value of return on investment and pervades every aspect of American education, from teacher training to assessment. Williamson (1994) argues that the efficiency narrative emphasizes efficient use of funds, efficient teacher labor, and efficient student achievement (p. 58).…”

“…Efficiency, according to Williamson (1994), is rooted in the capitalist value of return on investment and pervades every aspect of American education, from teacher training to assessment. Williamson (1994) argues that the efficiency narrative emphasizes efficient use of funds, efficient teacher labor, and efficient student achievement (p. 58). These efficiency narratives are naturalized and easy to overlook.…”

“…As composition research has shown, students' writing development is a complex process and does not progress in a linear, efficient fashion (Haswell, 2000;Sternglass, 1997). However, the idea that writing is a general skill that can be learned efficiently and uniformly assessed persists (Williamson, 1994). The focus on financial efficiency, and even learning efficiency, seems at odds with studio programs that rely on small course caps and emphasize the difficult-to-measure aspects of learning.…”

How Professional Writing Pedagogy and University–Workplace Partnerships Can Shape the Mentoring of Workplace Writing

“…The problem for graduates entering the workforce, and the problem for workplace mentors training new employees to write, is that writing's use in educational settings can be decontextualized and of different goals compared with workplace writing, mainly because school-based writing instruction and assessment has rationale related to assessment of learning—a usage of writing based in the educational psychology founding multiple choice and other forms of psychometric-based assessment (Williamson, 2009). With this legacy of writing usage, students-turned-new employees likely conceptualize writing as an advanced form of a multiple choice test as much as a tool to produce or encode of new knowledge, as in the workplace.…”

Materials for Assessing the Writing Skill

“…These direct writing tests were often scored impressionistically which doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.1n.2p.233 resulting scores (Cooper & Odell, 1999). Giving the primary emphasis to speaking, Audio-lingual method, on the other hand, generated indirect multiplechoice items which were more reliable and objective (Crusan, 2002), and yet neglected global writing skills (Attali & Powers, 2008), leading to validity and authenticity problems (Hamp-Lyons, 2001;Bachman & Palmer, 1996;White, 1994) and efficiency problems (Williamson, 1994). Therefore, once again interest revived in a type of essay tests in which the problem of subjective assessment of the written samples could to be solved.…”