Group Notes: Assessment of Writing (Adler-Kassner, & Wardle; Scott, & Inoue)

The Project of This Book

• Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle point out that the discipline concerned with
writing and its teaching has been referred to variously—as writing studies, composition,
and rhetoric.
• One of the key concerns of researchers in the field is “the study of composed knowledge”
(1). Composed knowledge varies from one context to the other. Composed knowledge is
associated with technologies, the contexts within which knowledge is composed, and the
assessment processes adopted to evaluate that knowledge.
• Two approaches have been adopted in writing studies to evaluate the study of composed
knowledge. The first has involved disciplinary statements intended to inform policy-
making, and the second relates to “attempts to identify and clarify the boundaries of the
discipline” (2). In this book, the work of clarification and naming of the discipline’s ways
of knowing is accomplished through the notion of threshold concepts.
• The authors define threshold concepts as those “critical for continued learning and
participation in an area or within a community of practice” (2). Not just relevant for
writing studies, they emerged from work by economists interested in knowing how
undergraduate students can learn the concepts of their discipline.
o Since then, their adoption in writing studies and other disciplines reveals their
utility for a variety of fields.
o Threshold concepts have certain characteristics—they are transformative for
learners, in the ways those learners come to develop a sense of identity; they are
“irreversible” for learners; and they involve “troublesome knowledge” because
they are not readily apparent to learners.
o Beyond disciplines, threshold concepts are useful because they tend to shape how
the subject of composed knowledge is understood outside disciplines.
• Adler-Kassner and Wardle highlight “one metaconcept, Writing Is an Activity and a
Subject of Study, and five overarching concepts” throughout the book (4).
o Threshold concepts here could definitely be more than the thirty-seven the authors
identified, because such concepts are always organized around “sufficient
consensus” by a community of practice. They are not fixed, but their ability to
evolve signals that, for the authors, they are “final-for-now definitions of some of
what our field knows” (4). The refusal to pin some finality on their number or to
state that the number is only “some” of what we know suggests that threshold
concepts, as tools for producing and understanding disciplinary ideas, cannot be
finite. Not all members of a field need to agree on what constitutes particular
threshold concepts, nor on the fact that they are indeed threshold concepts.
Instead, a reasonable degree of disagreement can exist among members of a
discipline on (particular) threshold concepts, but the utility of threshold concepts
as vehicles for producing knowledge remains relevant.
• While enumerating a field’s repertoire of knowledge may seem a pointless enterprise, the
project to explicitly define what a field knows, according to the authors, is particularly
necessary in the moment when they wrote. For these authors, “the combination of
message, funding, and power” (5) among groups and individuals engaged in debates
about the nature of the field’s knowledge—what counts as “good writing”, how that
knowledge should be taught and assessed, etc.—compel an explicitness from those in the
 field themselves. In other words, this is a project of telling the story of a discipline’s
knowledge-making practices from the perspective of those who live that knowledge.
o For the authors, this process of naming for both members of the field (those they
called “expert practitioners” (6)) and those outside it (or “those with less
experience-based expertise” (6)) necessarily requires “some translating and
reframing” (6). The twin task here suggests breaking down a claim about a
threshold concept (for example, that “writing is ideological”) into its constituent
parts, to unpack what makes writing ideological, the contexts and texts within
which ideology unfolds, and what the ideological characteristic of writing means
for writers and their audiences.
• For the authors, knowledge about what the field knows needs to be continually explained
for the benefit of policy making and program development.
Writing Is An Activity and a Subject of Study
• The key word for the authors here is “activity”—the “production, consumption,
circulation, distribution, and use” (15) of writing across contexts. The study of writing as
a discipline is concerned with all of these activities.
• While popular discourse tends to see writing only as a skill to be acquired “once and for
all” (15) or “a basic, ideology-free skill” (16), the authors challenge this perspective by
pointing to research in writing studies that emphasizes the need for all writers “to study
expectations for writing within specific contexts and participate in those to some degree”
(16) to be considered successful writers.
Assessing Writing Shapes Contexts and Instruction (Tony Scott and Asao Inoue)
• Assessment, whether those are of student writing or of program outcomes, are always
shaped by “individual or institutional factors” (30), with inherent values.
• According to the authors, “assessment is not neutral” (30). In other words, it is
ideological, as when a course tests knowledge of citation styles (to signal that it values
understanding of disciplinary norms) or emphasizes reflective essays as part of
assignments (to reveal an interest in students’ personal experience of learning or
completing a task).
• According to the authors, assessments can have important consequences for learners
because they can shape relationships between those learners and their instructors and
frame “how students understand writing and their own abilities” (30).
Three Specific Questions/Applications
1. The idea that assessment is not neutral suggests its ideological character. This implies that
beyond academic environments, any judgment we make of writing, such as whether a
particular YouTube video is “effective,” “informative,” “good,” or “boring” reflects the
values and expectations inherent in our understanding of what constitutes “effective,”
informative,” “good,” or “boring” writing. We always need to question the values
undergirding the assessment of any kind of writing.
2. If there can be disagreements between members of a field on what constitutes a field’s
threshold concepts, how might that affect what is considered the field’s body of
knowledge? In other words, how much consensus is reasonable or desirable?
3. The authors’ claim that writing is an activity seen in its circulation is reflected in the ways
that TikTok videos move beyond platforms. One of the ways the circulation of writing
can be studied is to ask how a particular kind of writing is received by audiences as it
moves from one platform (TikTok, say) to another (Facebook).