Book Review of Interest: On Writing Assessment and Error
by Eric Blodgett, Graduate Student in English
(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning, by Brian Huot
Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2002. 216 pp.
Huot makes a number of interesting and revealing observations in this book, probably the most fundamental of these being his sense that too much thought about assessment remains tied to the idea of writing as something generalizable that can be assessed accurately and reliably independent of the writer, the context, the intended audience, and all of the other variables that composition theorists insist must be considered when attempting to teach writing to students. This particular strain of thought about assessment seems to have been left behind by English and composition instructors, but it still claims a significant number of adherents within what Huot calls the education and measurement communities.
Given the fact that composition theory has moved so far away from so-called “standardized” writing, I can’t help but wonder how or why this way of thinking about writing maintains such a significant place in the current educational environment. As Huot points out, such standardized testing and assessment of writing wields significant power in the world of education—admission to colleges and programs within colleges depends heavily on standardized forms of measurement, not to mention the huge role such testing and assessment plays in K-12 education. The methods and underlying assumptions informing writing assessment in the education and measurement communities differ greatly from those of the composition and writing instruction community, so what Huot is suggesting to me is that even if English departments are on the right track, this issue is an important one.
Another surprising finding that Huot discusses is the extent to which different readers will emerge with significantly different assessments of a piece of writing. Knowing what we know about readers and the ways in which different readers construct different meanings for the same texts should have made his finding less surprising. For me anyway, this observation makes perfect sense, but nevertheless, I had never consciously thought of myself as a subjective reader or as a subjective assessor. To be certain, I don’t feel as though I ever thought of myself as objective as an assessor, but Huot’s findings emphasize just how inaccurate an instructor’s assumed position as objective evaluator really is.
I was not surprised to find out that looking for errors in assessing a piece of writing will lead to finding errors. Nor was I surprised to find out that writing assessment still seems to consist, to a large degree, of identifying errors. Certainly many writing instructors have moved away from this method of assessment, but the effects of viewing student writing as something that needs to be corrected still lingers. I know from my own experience assessing writing that moving away from looking for errors has resulted in finding fewer grammatical and mechanical errors. The errors are likely still there, but what I have found in the student writing instead are more substantive issues that the student writer can address that will have a greater impact on the quality and effectiveness of her or his writing.
And I have also found that by looking for places in which student writers are either making more advanced rhetorical and conceptual moves, or are trying to make those advanced moves, rather than almost exclusively looking for errors, the picture I get of student writing is more fleshed out. I find students making or trying to make more advanced moves all of the time, and in seeing what I would say is the bigger picture of their writing, I am able to help them see how that move might be working or, in the case of a move not quite succeeding, we are able to take a look at the writing and understand why the move might not be working and how he or she might be able to make it work.
What we seem to be doing then, is learning more about writing and less about grammar except in the case of how grammar and mechanics can help or hinder effective communication. As Huot notes, writing assessment provides a significant opportunity for instruction, but that instruction is too limited if the assessment is focused too narrowly on finding errors without uncovering the bigger picture of what the student is trying to do with her or his writing.
