journal of writing assessment

Journal of Writing Assessment

The Journal of Writing Assessment provides a peer-reviewed forum for the publication of manuscripts from a variety of disciplines and perspectives that address topics in writing assessment. Submissions may investigate such assessment-related topics as grading and response, program assessment, historical perspectives on assessment, assessment theory, and educational measurement as well as other relevant topics. Articles are welcome from a variety of areas including K-12, college classes, large-scale assessment, and noneducational settings. We also welcome book reviews of recent publications related to writing assessment and annotated bibliographies of current issues in writing assessment.

Please refer to the submission guidelines on this page for information for authors and submission guidelines.

• Volume 17, Issue 1, 2024
• Volume 16, Issue 1, 2023
• Volume 15, Issue 1, 2022
• Volume 14, Issue 1, 2021
• Volume 13, Issue 2, 2020
• Volume 13, Issue 1, 2020
• Volume 12, Issue 1, 2019
• Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018
• Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017
• Volume 9, Issue 2, 2016
• Volume 9, Issue 1, 2016
• Volume 8, Issue 1, 2015
• Volume 7, Issue 1, 2014
• Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013
• Volume 5, Issue 1, 2012
• Volume 4, Issue 1, 2011
• Volume 3, Issue 2, 2007
• Volume 3, Issue 1, 2007
• Volume 2, Issue 2, 2005
• Volume 2, Issue 1, 2005
• Volume 1, Issue 2, 2003
• Volume 1, Issue 1, 2003

Student Self Placement

Special issues, editor’s introduction: special issue on student self placement (ssp).

• Whithaus, Carl

Placement is Everyone’s Business: A Love Letter to Our SSP Coalition

• Pantelides, Kate L ;
• Whittig, Erin

In this introduction to the special issue, the co-editors offer the umbrella term "methods of student self-placement" (SSP) to refer to any placement mechanism that includes student choice so that we can further build theoretical apparatus, gather much-needed empirical data, and subsequently flesh out meaningful differences in approaches. They argue that just as SSP asks us to rethink the mission of first-year writing, it also asks us to rethink some of the divisions in Writing Studies because placement work is meaningful across the university. Ultimately, they conclude that SSP isn't an easy fix for systemic problems in higher education, but it is powerful in fully acknowledging the complexity of placement and meeting students' diverse learning needs. 

Directed Self-Placement for Multilingual, Multicultural International Students

• Johnson, Kristine ;
• Vander Bie, Sara

Directed self-placement (DSP) methods remain relatively rare in multilingual writing programs because such methods present unique ethical and academic risks. Grounded in five years of institutional research, this article reports on a first-year writing program in which DSP is the sole means of placement for international students and in which the international student population is linguistically, educationally, and culturally diverse. We offer logistical and technical guidance for creating DSP programs for multilingual writers, and we argue that DSP can be a vehicle for more equitable, socially just writing placement for multilingual, multicultural writers.

It Takes a Campus: Agility in the Development of Directed Self-Placement

• Whitney, Kelly ;
• Skinner, Carolyn

Transitioning from a conventional placement model for first-year writing to a student self-placement (SSP) model requires many stakeholders to shift their perspectives on students, assessment, and the nature of the work of writing program administrators (WPAs). This article recounts the communicative and administrative agility involved in launching SSP while simultaneously researching its effects on student success. It also foregrounds the shifts in numerous roles--including those of instructors, students, and advisors, and even our own roles as WPA-researchers--that have been prompted by the transition to SSP. In particular, this article explores the connections between those roles and academic paternalism--an attitude that presumes to know what is best for students, that doubts students' abilities to make good placement decisions, and that treats conventional placement outcomes as the measure against which SSP should be judged. Adherence to academic paternalism and its investment in "expert" assessment of student writing ability emerges as an obstacle to realizing the full potential of SSP to support equitable placement practices.

Localizing Directed Self-Placement: UX Stories and Methods

• Kryger, Kathleen ;
• Mitchum, Catrina ;
• Higgins, Aly

This article seeks to address the need for research supporting localization efforts in placement assessment. We argue that as a highly technical communication endeavor, directed self-placement (DSP) and its developers can benefit from research in technical and professional communication (TPC). We synthesize the theoretical relations between DSP and TPC, especially regarding models of localization, and demonstrate how implementing user experience (UX) design can help address placement equity concerns by foregrounding accessibility and usability from the beginning. We follow this discussion of DSP and TPC scholarship with storied examples from our institution, providing a sample range of UX methods that (1) are flexible across contexts, (2) are relatively manageable to implement, and (3) are cognizant of WPA, staff, and students’ time, labor, and compensation concerns. We propose DSP as a form of advocacy, and we demonstrate how UX method/ologies are an excellent choice for DSP localization efforts toward equity and accessibility.

(Re)Placing Personalis: A Study of Placement Reform and Self-Construction in Mission-Driven Contexts

• Sweeney, Meghan ;
• Colombini, Crystal

Recent movements in higher education have opened many opportunities for writing program administrators to reform first-year writing placement procedures, including continued development and adaptation of Directed Self Placement (DSP) models alongside ongoing research into their potential to foster student agency and advance linguistic, racial, and social justice in the academy. Our study traces and compares the efforts of two writing program administrators to reform flawed placement processes at their two mission-driven liberal arts institutions—one, a small Lasallian university and Hispanic-serving Institution in Northern California; the other, a private research Jesuit university located in New York City. Using inter-institutional, grounded theory research, this study examines students' reflections on their placement choices to understand “ substantive validity ,” inquiring intentionally into ways that students self-locate with regard to their self-placement assessments and connecting to the mission-based language of personalis , what belongs to the person. Findings indicate that students use four rhetorical moves to personalize their placement: proliferating, riffing, importing, and qualifying. Specifically, the study calls into question current understandings of under-placement in DSP models, complicating DSP’s fundamentals of choice , guidance , and justice .

Supporting Student Linguistic Identity and Autonomy in Directed Self Placement Through Linguistic Domains Using Qualtrics Scoring

• Decker, Laura ;
• Taormina-Barrientos, Brianne

In this article, we review the current and dynamic state of multilingual writers, especially their experiences in Composition and with English self-placement methods. Then, we position our institution and department’s theoretical underpinnings for support of multilingual writers and their self-placement, and we describe how we utilized Cavazos and Karaman’s (2021) Translingual Disposition Questionnaire as a framework for our recent revision of our Directed Self-Placement survey and utilized Qualtrics scoring tools to provide students with feedback on a novel language   domain.  Our intent was to offer multilingual students transparency and choice in the English placement process so they could select the first year Composition course that best matched their needs. We hope that other WPAs gain insight on how to integrate asset-based philosophies and linguistic domains using Qualtrics scoring to offer their multilingual students more autonomy in their first year Composition experiences. 

Self-Characterization in the Self-Placement Assessment Ecology: Complicating the Stories We Tell about DSP’s Effects and Effectiveness

• Tinkle, Theresa ;
• Godfrey, Jason ;
• Hammond, J. W. ;
• Moos, Andrew

Scholarship on student self-placement (SSP) emphasizes the importance of understanding methods like directed self-placement (DSP) as dynamic assessment ecologies (e.g., Inoue, 2015; Nastal et al., 2022; Wang, 2020), with implications not only for placement but also for how students conceptualize writing and themselves (e.g., Johnson, 2022). What can be learned about SSP’s ecological impacts by more meaningfully attending not just to patterns in students’ placement decisions but also to the qualitative content of their (self-)reflections and (self-)characterizations? Leveraging a dataset of more than 5,000 SSP pathways, we examine a corpus of short-answer survey responses, totaling more than half a million words, in which students wrote about their strengths as writers and what writing tasks they find most challenging. Students’ words help us understand how they see themselves as writers and how they conceive of college writing expectations. Through data analysis, this study found implications for how corpus data can be used to better understand potential tensions between students’ and institutions’ understandings of academic writing in a self-placement ecology.

• 1 supplemental PDF

After Implementation: Assessing Student Self-Placement in College Writing Programs

• Arnold, Lisa R ;
• Jiang, Lei ;
• Hassel, Holly

While a growing body of research provides instruction on how to implement student self-placement (SSP) for college writing courses, there is a gap in the literature about how to evaluate SSP after implementation. This article offers strategies and recommendations for assessing SSP processes, based on the authors’ experiences of developing a new SSP mechanism and evaluating its effectiveness over several years. This article presents statistical data from our analysis of our institution’s SSP, which informs a heuristic set o fquestions that others can use to evaluate the effectiveness of their own SSP after implementation. This analysis demonstrates the value of evaluating SSP processes for writing programs, as well as outlining issues that may emerge and should be considered when analyzing SSP.

Informing Self-Placement: A Polyvocal Narrative Case Study

• Toth, Christie ;
• Andrus, Jennifer ;
• Onwuzuruoha, Nkenna ;
• Clawson, Nicole ;
• Fraser, Pietera ;
• Fochs, Aubrey ;
• Rivera Aguilar, Samuel

This article provides a polyvocal narrative of the development, initial assessment, and ongoing revision of an Informed Self-Placement (ISP) process initially implemented during the COVID pandemic. The authors intersperse collectively narrated description how the ISP unfolded in its first two years with individual reflections on those experiences from a variety of positions and identities. Data so far suggest that this ISP process has narrowed but not fully closed racial equity gaps in first-year writing placement while maintaining enrollments and academic performance in the first-year writing course sequence. Persistent equity issues reside not only in the ISP instrument itself but the systems by which students learn about the ISP and the opportunities they have to complete it.

JWA Reading List

Editor’s introduction | summer 2023.

The Journal of Writing Assessment’s Reading List is excited to release our Summer 2023 Issue!

Our reviews in this issue explore four recent books related to assessment across a spectrum of educational contexts, including K-12 classrooms, two-year colleges, and four-year institutions. The texts also cover a range of assessment areas, including writing placement, writing in and across the disciplines, equitable classroom assessment, and high-stakes standardized testing in K-12 contexts. Reviews of the following texts are represented in this issue:

• Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education , edited by Jessica Nastal, Mya Poe, and Christie Toth—reviewed by Megan Friess (Cypress College)
• Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices , edited by Gavin W. Henning, Gianina R. Baker, Natasha A. Jankowski, Anne E. Lundquist and Erick Montenegro—reviewed by Stephanie Hedge (University of Illinois, Springfield)
• Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out by Sandra Murphy, Peggy O’Neill—reviewed by Jeremy Levine (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
• Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment, and the Aims of Fairness edited by Diane Kelly-Riley, Norbert Elliot—reviewed by Anthony Lince (University of California, San Diego)

We are thankful for the energy and hard work of all of our reviewers and we hope their reviews bring renewed attention to these texts and help our readers discover new scholarship to enrich their work. We’d also like to thank our amazing team of graduate assistant editors: Kathleen Kryger (University of Arizona), Jennifer Burke Reifman (University of California, Davis), Tiffany Smith (Georgia State University), and Sarah Stetson (Brown University).

As always, we are interested in recruiting new reviewers; you can be added to our list by filling out this form . We’re also always interested in recommendations for new texts in writing assessment to review (self-promotion is welcome!); you can contact us at [email protected] .

Stacy Wittstock | Assistant Editor, JWA Reading List | University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Chris Blankenship | Assistant Editor, JWA Reading List | Salt Lake Community College

Review of Diane Kelly-Riley and Norbert Elliot’s Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment, and the Aim of Fairness

Reviewed by Anthony Lince , University of California, San Diego

Kelly-Riley, D., & Elliot, N. (Eds.). (2020). Improving outcomes: Disciplinary writing, local assessment, and the aim of fairness. Modern Language Association.

When it comes to assessment, our field is currently having challenging, but much-needed, conversations—some of which are focused on equity, linguistic justice, and student agency. Asao Inoue (2019), for example, has pushed back against traditional grading practices and, is instead, in favor of labor-based grading contracts, which, Inoue asserts, “attempt to form an inclusive, more diverse ecological place, one that can be antiracist and anti-White supremacist by its nature (p. 13). These conversations around assessment, however, aren’t exclusive to our field. In Susan D. Blum’s (2020) edited collection, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) , educators in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields all wrestle with how they can move away from grading practices that are punitive and not student-centered. (For an excellent overview of this book, check out Michelle Tram Nguyen’s recent review on the JWA Reading List.)

Improving Outcomes: Disciplinary Writing, Local Assessment, and the Aim of Fairness —a collection edited by Diane Kelly-Riley and Norbert Elliot—contributes to this important conversation on assessment with a focus on fairness and assessment across the disciplines. Kelly-Riley and Elliot note that, “within this collection, fairness operates as an integrative principle” (p. 1). Though, fairness isn’t thought of as a monolithic idea that can be applied to all fields. Instead, as Anne Ruggles Gere makes clear in her foreword, “by recognizing and valuing the discourses of a given discipline, writing assessment can enact fairness in assessment rather than applying inflexible standards to all fields” (p. vi). She continues: “the best assessment is constructed locally, and, for college students, the disciplines in which they enroll become a local context” (p. vi). Naturally, then, to discuss this varied, and situated, idea of fairness, the contributors in this collection span the disciplines—from nursing to engineering, writing studies, and architecture—and are from a range of academic contexts: two- and four-year to public and private institutions. Constructed around putting “fairness at the center” of writing instruction and assessment (p. 5), this collection is divided into four parts: “Values,” “Foundational Issues,” “Disciplinary Writing,” and “Location.”

The contributors of part one, “Values,” all examine the unique needs of students within specific academic contexts and how educational values should be tied to those needs. Mya Poe begins part one with her essay, “A Matter of Aim: Disciplinary Writing, Writing Assessment, and Fairness.” She turns to assessment research to “examine two common frames for writing assessment in the disciplines—program accreditation and classroom research” (p. 17), concluding that considerations around student fairness are often ignored in both frames. Ruth Osorio’s essay, “A Disability-as-Insight Approach to Multimodal Assessment,” lays out ways in which a disability-as-insight model can be used “as a path that merges fairness—designing assessments that allow for diverse and flexible methods for achieving the primary goal of an assignment—and social justice” (p. 29). Brooke A. Carlson and Cari Ryan, in “Fairness as Pedagogy: Uniformity, Transparency, and Equity through Trajectory-Based Responses to Writing in Hawai’i,” use rubrics as a tool to promote fairness by being transparent with students about the evaluative methods in which they will be graded.

The contributors of part two, “Foundational Issues,” outline educational measurement as socially situated. The first essay argues for seeing assessment as an evidentiary argument—with a focus on students developing competencies in valued activities (Mislevy). Benander and Refaei, in their essay, detail how their basic writing courses have outcomes that are fairly assessed “through shared rubrics tailored to the interests of each student” (p. 67). The next essay explores how peer-feedback can be embedded in classrooms as a means to promote fairness (Hart-Davidson and Meeks). Erick Montenegro, in the penultimate essay of part two, asserts that “assessment efforts must become culturally responsive” to better understand the learning gains made by students (p. 93). The last essay in part two argues for faculty members to learn about various disciplinary perspectives to create shared learning outcomes at specific institutions (Schneider and Hennings).

In part three, “Disciplinary Writing,” the scholars focus on assessments that are situated within their specific educational contexts. The first essay argues for a strengthened connection between high school and college literacies (Farris). The next essay’s authors discuss how they use evidence-based assessment in their first-year composition program to promote programmatic fairness (Buyserie, Macklin, Frye, and Ericsson). Singer-Freeman and Bastone, in their essay, argue for reflective writing in a child development course to help students think deeply about their own lives and the course content. In an architecture writing course, Hogrefe and Briller argue for reflective practices that can help their diverse cohort of students. In their essay, Maneval and Ward discuss how the incorporation of nursing-specific writing genre assignments in nursing classes could elevate writing itself as a practice. Williams, in the last essay of part three, discusses issues of fairness as it relates to assessment within science, engineering, and mathematics courses.

“Location,” part four, closes the collection by having essays that move beyond traditional four-year institutions. Rasmussen and Reid consider questions around transfer and equal opportunity at their two-year college. Whithaus, in the next essay, considers how “localized assessments can attend to fairness, as well as validity and reliability,” not only face-to-face but online and in hybrid classes as well (p. 213). Rhodes, in the final essay of part four and in this edited collection, discusses accreditation as something that can, and should, “affirm institutional commitment to fairness for students’ access to, and achievement of, quality learning” (p. 225).

Taken together, there were parts of this collection that strongly resonated with me. A disability-as-insight approach for multimodal assessment (Osorio) helps me consider the ways I can construct my classrooms and assignments to best help all learners succeed, especially students who learn in non-normative ways. Mya Poe’s essay was also illuminating as she illustrated the racial harm that placement tests can have on certain students. And Hogrefe and Briller, in their essay on an architecture writing program, provided a wonderful message for any teacher or program director to take away: to have authenticity of curriculum, “students [should be] placed at the center of our efforts and treated as colleagues” (p. 170).

On the other hand, the essays in this collection that had a focus on using rubrics weren’t, for me, all that convincing. Those authors claimed that rubrics can be fair because they are transparent for students. However, I question this claim, and I wonder how transparent racially situated biases can be through the use of rubrics. Furthermore, in my experience, rubrics seem to erase individuality, not promote diverse thinking. If fairness is the goal, rubrics seem to hinder that outcome.

With that noted, the conversations in this book centered on fairness and assessment are crucial for our field and others to have. Any rhetoric and writing studies scholar can find engaging ideas here, but I’d specifically recommend this collection to new rhet/comp scholars entering the field and/or to those in other disciplines wanting to integrate writing into their programs—and, by extension, assessment of that writing—with the aim of being fair.

Blum, S. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom . WAC Clearinghouse https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2019.0216.0

Nguyen, M. (2022). [Review of the book Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead)] . The Journal of Writing Assessment Reading List .

Review of Sandra Murphy and Peggy O’Neill’s Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out

Reviewed by Jeremy Levine , University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Murphy, S., & O’Neill, P. (2023).  Assessing writing to support learning: Turning accountability inside out . Routledge.

Sandra Murphy and Peggy O’Neill’s (2023) Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out synthesizes existing research on writing assessment, psychometrics, and writing pedagogy to argue that teachers should be at the center of the school accountability system. Foregrounding formative assessment processes such as portfolio grading, Murphy and O’Neill propose a framework through which ecological writing assessment (which has been applied at the post-secondary level, per Wardle and Roozen 2012; Inoue 2015) can be brought to K-12 instruction. In the book’s first chapter, they argue that such a pivot will reduce the extent to which high-stakes assessment narrows writing curricula, account for a fuller picture of writers’ knowledge aligned with modern research, and include teachers as active decision-makers in writing assessment. This claim illuminates the administrative and policy risks of hitching the K-12 writing assessment wagon to standardized tests: because of their limited view, tests can misguide administrators and the public about what our students know about writing. On the teaching side, the emphasis on the narrowed curriculum could also include examination of the contextual nature of testing’s influence on instruction (McCarthey, 2008) and how teachers mediate testing expectations through their own goals for writing (e.g. Wahleithner, 2018). These local concerns shift the book’s exigence slightly: teachers are already making writing assessment their own; a more productive policy paradigm would build on this teacher agency, rather than create obstacles for it.

Chapter Two is a crash course in writing assessment, overviewing the fundamental concepts of reliability and validity. Validity is of particular interest to Murphy and O’Neill, who make two validity-based critiques of high-stakes testing. The first is that the accountability system must take consequential validity seriously: that the purpose of administering a test affects how teachers and students approach it, meaning the curricular changes that accompany high-stakes testing are a threat to the test’s validity. Second, standardized testing has weaknesses in terms of construct validity : the extent to which a test measures what it claims to. The construct validity critique is built on the concept that student text is not necessarily a stand-in for student writing knowledge, as a student’s ability to produce a specific genre under testing circumstances cannot speak to their rhetorical flexibility or approach to writing across genres, purposes, or settings. This claim about construct validity helpfully builds on the growing body of research that locates substantial portions of writing development as taking place off the page, including concepts such as dispositions and identities (see Driscoll & Zhang, 2022). The importance of each of these concerns is made clear in Chapter Three, which focuses on evolving theories of writing and writing instruction. Accounting for both social and cognitive theories of writing, O’Neill and Murphy offer an overview of writing concepts (e.g. writing as expression, writing as a product, writing as a social activity, etc.) and instructional practices (writing for a real audience, building genre knowledge, participating in peer review, reflecting). Composition researchers will surely recognize these lists of concepts, but they do important work in demonstrating how out-of-step a high-stakes exam is with theories of writing instruction (a blow to its consequential validity) and to how writing is understood (a blow to its construct validity).

With these flaws in high-stakes assessment established, the rest of the book pivots toward solutions. The first of two goals in Chapter Four is to outline classroom-scale models of formative assessment that give students opportunities to reflect on their own writing processes. To illustrate the rigor of such formative assessments, and demonstrate their promise of improving metacognition, O’Neill and Murphy offer several examples of self-assessment rubrics that may help teachers and students identify key facets of the writing process to focus on. The second goal of Chapter 4 is to describe approaches for large-scale assessment practices that align with the cognitive and social characteristics of writing described in the third chapter. This means conceiving of writing as a task- or context-specific activity, which in testing circumstances might involve portfolio assessment, assessments that integrate reading and writing, collaborative writing, and digital or multimodal writing tasks. These recommendations culminate in the authors’ invocation for accountability to be turned “inside-out,” putting the complexity of writing, and the needs of students, at the forefront of writing assessment on a large scale, rather than prioritizing the psychometric approach of standardization and controlling variability. These arguments for rewriting large-scale writing assessment lead to questions about what happens when these measures are attached to accountability systems. For example, portfolio assessment at the state level may absorb all student writing into a bureaucratic system (Scott, 2008), or schools may feel undue pressure to improve, say, “writing motivation” scores, and as a result, could focus more on scores than on actual writing motivation (see Koretz, 2017). O’Neill and Murphy make a strong case for why these elements must be included in large-scale assessment; the question is what the implications might be once that happens.

Chapters Five and Six offer strategies for bringing the recommendations from Chapter Four into reality. Chapter Five focuses on methods for redesigning writing assessment, arguing that teachers need to be at the center of assessment processes because teachers are ultimately responsible for implementing classroom changes. To make this change a reality, O’Neill and Murphy propose investing in professional development, involving teachers in assessment design, and supporting collaboration across levels of education. The sixth and final chapter of the volume focuses on an ecological model of writing assessment. Building on the work of Inoue (2015) and Wardle and Roozen (2012), both of whom focus on assessment ecologies at the post-secondary level, the authors offer an invocation for similar frameworks to make their way into K-12 schools. Combined with the emerging psychometric concept of ecological validity, this chapter’s focus on ecologies creates a “springboard for action” (p. 192) that can mobilize teachers and researchers toward shifting the terms of control for assessment and accountability in the United States. This strategy combines rather nicely with parallel calls for reform in education studies, which suggest student surveys (Schneider et. al, 2021) or inspectorates (Berner, 2017) may be more productive (and ecologically-minded) assessment systems. As O’Neill and Murphy conceptualize it, writing can be a productive window into school life, thereby giving it the potential to be especially useful in these imagined reforms.

In total, Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out offers conversation-starting concepts for multiple audiences. For policymakers at school, local, and even state levels, it illustrates how modern conceptions of accountability are out-of-step with best practices in writing instruction and assessment. For instructors at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, it invites reflection around how classroom assessment practices can be used to foster students’ learning about writing, and when or how such assessment practices can become disconnected from assessment. For researchers on writing, it offers a framework for conceptualizing validity on ecological terms and invites future inquiry on the intersection of classroom assessment and policy concerns. Primarily grounded in research and concepts from writing studies, its connections to education reform – implementation, accountability, and possibilities for reform – leave lingering questions regarding how the proposed ecological model of assessment can be implemented as policy. At its core, the text is a reminder that classrooms are about relationships between students and teachers, and this relationship — not the concerns of parties outside of that room — should be at the center of conversations about learning.

Berner, A (2017). Would School Inspections Work in the United States? Johns Hopkins School of Education, Institute for Education Policy.

Driscoll, D. L., & Zhang, J. (2022, March). Mapping long-term writing experiences: Operationalizing the writing development model for the study of persons, processes, contexts, and time. In Composition Forum (Vol. 48). Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.

Inoue, A. B. (2015).  Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future . Parlor Press.

Koretz, D. (2017). The testing charade: Pretending to make schools better . University of Chicago Press

McCarthey, S. J. (2008). The impact of No Child Left Behind on teachers’ writing instruction. Written Communication, 25(4), 462-505

Murphy, S., & O’Neill, P. (2022).  Assessing writing to support learning: Turning accountability inside out . Taylor & Francis.

Schneider, J., Noonan, J., White, R. S., Gagnon, D., & Carey, A. (2021). Adding “student voice” to the mix: Perception surveys and state accountability systems. AERA Open , 7, 1-18.

Scott, T. (2008). “Happy to comply”: Writing assessment, fast-capitalism, and the cultural logic of control. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies , 30 (2), 140-161.

Wahleithner, J. M. (2018). Five portraits of teachers’ experiences teaching writing: Negotiating knowledge, student need, and policy. Teachers College Record , 120 (1), 1-60

Wardle, E., & Roozen, K. (2012). Addressing the complexity of writing development: Toward an ecological model of assessment.  Assessing Writing ,  17 (2), 106-119.

Review of Henning et al.’s Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices

Reviewed by Stephanie Hedge , University of Illinois, Springfield

Henning, G. W., Jankowski, N. A., Montenegro, E., Baker, G. R., & Lundquist, A. E. (Eds.). (2022).  Reframing assessment to center equity: Theories, models, and practices. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

It has become increasingly unethical to ignore the role that higher education plays in the perpetuation of systemic injustices and inequalities, and many individuals and institutions are looking for ways to upend these systems to fulfill the promise and power of a higher education for all who enter these hallowed halls. But challenging entrenched systems of power is a big ask, and uncertainty about where or how to start that work is a barrier that can turn activist desire into stagnation or apathy. Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices offers one avenue for starting this work: building and implementing assessment lenses, frameworks, and practices that center ideologies of equity, both as practice (how we conduct assessment) and purpose (using assessment to discover and remediate equity gaps). The editors of this text are engaged in a passionate call to action, inviting the reader to take what they learn in this “companion on an equity journey” (p. xvi) to make real, meaningful change. The second chapter, “The Assessment Activist,” by Divya Samuga_Gyaanam+Bheda, all but begs the reader to deliberately, consciously, purposefully, and repeatedly, pick up the mantle of activist and start doing the work of making change (p. 25), and the following 18 chapters outline concretely how to do that work. Do not just read this book and put it back down, the editors implore, but use it as the starting point for disrupting systems of oppression. The words are nothing without the work.

Editors Gavin W. Henning, Gianina R. Baker, Natasha A. Jankowski, Anne E. Lundquist, and Erick Montenegro balance theory and practice, following “a framework of ‘what, why, how, and now what’” (p. xv) as they unpack what equity centered assessment desires to be and why it is vital and urgent before moving to sharing specific, concrete examples of what this looks like in practice, from the individual classroom to the larger institution. This text figures assessment as a kind of lever for institutional change, a practice that determines what questions are asked, what stories are told, and what voices are heard. The book invites readers to think about assessment beyond a “compliance/improvement divide” (p. 326), and instead as a “transformative process on behalf of social justice and decolonization in the academy and the world” (p. 303).

The central claim of this text is that assessment is never neutral, which is both a critique and a call for change. Editors Montenegro and Henning point out that assessment “is planned and carried out by people and conducted within social institutions guided by norms, policies, assumptions, and preferences, which means bias is inherently part of the process because assessment is socially situated” (p. 5). This text argues that if those of us who conduct assessment are not deliberate in our framing—if we do not explicitly and consciously choose a methodology that centers equity—we are using the “default” frameworks of oppression, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. “Assessment is complicit in either exacerbating the equity problem already existing in higher education today or mitigating it. It is not a value neutral exercise,” says Bheda in her chapter, before inviting the reader to be a “revolutionary assessment activist” (p. 33). Changing the frameworks that we use for deciding what, when, how, and why to conduct assessment has the potential to create ideological and epistemic shifts institutionally, and the text shares several different approaches to doing this work. In the first chapter, Montenegro and Henning offer series of research paradigms (similar to Janet Emig’s 1982 Inquiry Paradigms, although she is not cited here) that explain the underlying epistemologies that guide assessment methods and call for the adoption of frameworks and paradigms that either make space for or explicitly require a focus on equity and social justice (p. 14). The third chapter explores a series of historical assessment “lenses,” tracing the broad approaches of assessment practice through time to point out the equity gaps in assessment historically and argue for a new lens that centers equity. Chapter four provides “The Current State of Scholarship on Assessment” and acts as a mini-encyclopedia of relevant topics, definitions, and schools of thought, while chapter five unpacks the promise and power of storytelling as an assessment strategy. Closing out the first part of their text, chapters six and seven share models, approaches, and lenses to thinking about equity-centered assessment, giving concrete, specific changes to make in existing assessment systems to center equity. The authors are careful to avoid advocating for a single approach, and rather provide the tools for thinking critically about existing frameworks and epistemologies and shifting towards equity.

That said, throughout the text, the editors pay particular attention to Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world. There are sections in the framing chapters dedicated to Indigenous epistemologies, and chapter 7 works to “elevate the work of decolonization and Indigeneity and provide an example of that in practice” (p. 112), acting as showcase for the ways that shifts in an assessment lens lead to particular kinds of assessment practices. The authors are careful to include Indigenous voices in this chapter (and others) as they lift up this specific paradigm.

Following on from the required shifts in worldview asked by the first part of the text, part three dives into what this kind of assessment looks like in practice. The authors are quick to point out that changes in perspective are the first step, but they are just the first step, and more work is required. “There is no checklist or four-step process to attain equity” (p. 327) Bheda, Jankowski, and Peter Felten argue in the closing chapter, but there are ways to do this work in multiple different spaces, as chapters tackle the particulars of assessment in class meetings and assignment development; opening assessment practices to meaningful explorations of the environment and the inclusion of student voices; moving assessment to cocurricular spaces and student affairs; and thinking about assessment in STEM, at community colleges, and at HBCUs. While much of the first section of this text was authored by the editors, the chapters in part three are all authored by the diverse scholars and assessment practitioners who did the work, tracing their practices as a how-to guide for making meaningful change in higher ed.

This book ends the way that it opens: with a call to action. “There is a lot of good trouble assessment professionals can get into, and you have agency” (p. 339), the editors say. Deciding to do this work is the first step. It is not the hardest step (for this work is hard), but it requires the greatest conviction, and it requires community, intentionality, and a measure of risk. Picking up this book is the start of doing that work, which the editors acknowledge as they invite the reader into further conversation in the conclusion. But the work is worth doing. And this text seeks to empower the reader to do the work; to change the world. The book ends with a challenge: “what are you going to do with this newfound power?” (p. 339). How will you answer their call?

Emig, J. (1982). Inquiry Paradigms and Writing. College Composition and Communication, 33(1), 64–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/357845

Review of Jessica Nastal, Mya Poe, and Christie Toth’s Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education

Reviewed by Megan Friess , Cypress College

Nastal, J., Poe, M., & Toth, C. (Eds.). (2022). Writing placement in two-year Colleges: The pursuit of equity in postsecondary education . The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1565

What does it mean to be college-ready? Who belongs in the first-year composition classroom versus developmental English courses? Why these students and not others? How is the decision made? And is that decision truly equitable? If not, what can faculty and writing program administrators do about it? Responding to questions like these and to a long-standing call for change in writing assessment and placement practices in higher education, Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education showcases how eleven different community colleges from across the United States have tackled the challenge of reform in both big and small ways.

The authors included in this work acknowledge the harm that traditional writing placement methods have caused, such as chronic underplacement, especially to BIPOC and other marginalized students, and offer a multitude of approaches for implementing more equitable writing placement practices. Where each college is in this process and what the results look like vary, but every chapter in this collection showcases the stories, research, data, and strategies used by faculty members to affect real and lasting change at their colleges.

The book is designed to be read in a couple of different ways, depending on the needs and interests of the reader. Firstly, broken up into three overarching sections (The Long Road of Placement Reform, Innovation and Equity in Placement Reform, and Pandemic-Precipitated Placement Reform) the book presets the case studies and methods used by timespan. The eleven chapters advance from pre-COVID-19-pandemic efforts and methods prompted by internal institutional push for change, to pre-pandemic externally prompted change, and finally to pandemic-driven efforts and speculation for post-pandemic continuances. The case studies range from methods that have been implemented and data recorded and analyzed, to “in the thick of it” changes and efforts, to hopes for lasting change and further efforts to reform and adapt. For alternative ways of reading, the introduction presents charts which inform the reader how to read by specific placement method or by region, accrediting body, and state. These options allow the reader freedom to navigate the eleven chapters and find what would best aid them for their unique position and desires. On the whole, this collection “reminds us that scholars at two-year colleges are at the forefront of advocating for and developing transformative and humanizing writing placement assessments that create more equitable conditions for historically minoritized students at two year colleges” (p. xi).

Diving deeper into the book, section one, The Long Road of Placement Reform, details four two-year colleges’ attempts to reform, create, adapt, and refine writing placement assessments for their students. The first chapter, “No Reform Is an Island: Tracing the Influences and Consequences of Evidence-Based Placement Reform at a Two-Year Predominantly Black Institution,” by Jessica Nastal, Jason Evans, and Jessica Gravely of Prairie State College, looks at over a decade of the college’s history with writing placement. While the school did not use standardized testing as a placement method, the authors point out that “even well-intentioned homegrown placement tools also reproduce the flaws and betray the influences of the larger system” (p. 35). They highlight how reforming the “placement ecosystem” (p. 53) does not happen in a vacuum but requires institutional buy-in and effort on every level. “From ACCUPLACER to Informed Self-Placement at Whatcom Community College: Equitable Placement as an Evolving Practice” by Jeffrey Klausman and Signee Lynch is the second chapter of the work. It surveys the development of Whatcom Community College’s efforts to move from the ACCUPLACER test, which mainly focused on grammar and editing skills, toward an online multiple-measure, directed self-placement process which they call Informed Self-Placement. Chapter three is an article by Kris Messer, Jamey Gallagher, and Elizabeth Hart titled, “A Path to Equity, Agency, and Access: Self-Directed Placement at the Community College of Baltimore County” which presents their reflections on how self-directed placement for students has acted as a “catalyst for a shift in not just [their] pedagogy but [their] curriculum” (p. 100). Rounding out section one, “Welcome/Not Welcome: From Discouragement to Empowerment in the Writing Placement Process at Central Oregon Community College,” by Jane Denison-Furness, Stacey Lee Donohue, Annemarie Hamlin, and Tony Russell highlights how the writing placement assessment is one of the first introductions students have to college and how standardized testing can have harmful effects on the mindset of these students. They document their efforts to reform writing placement practices alongside redesigning course structures and curriculum. Section one presents stories and data to highlight that more equitable reform is possible and acts as a guide for long-term, systemic reform for those looking to start their own efforts or to refine processes already in place.

The second section is titled Innovation and Equity in Placement Reform and showcases four colleges’ responses to various mandates on writing placement reformation to better address issues of equity. The first entry of this section is chapter five, “Narrowing the Divide in Placement at a Hispanic Serving Institution: The Case of Yakima Valley College,” by Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt and Travis Margoni. This case study illustrates how “placement reform plays an important role in the college’s mission as an HSI and serves as a foundation for reforms across campus toward more equitable and antiracist practices” (p. 131). In chapter six, “Putting ACCUPLACER in Its Place: Expanding Evidence in Placement Reform at Jamestown Community College,” Jessica M. Kubiak shows how her college is moving toward a multiple measures assessment, and she considers how non-matriculated students impact the discussion and efforts of writing placement reforms. The case study that makes up chapter seven, “Tracking the Racial Consequences of Placement by Probability: A Case Study at Kingsborough Community College,” highlights the authors’, Annie Del Principe, Lesley Broder, and Lauren Levesque, challenges with using a writing sample as a single method of placement. Instead, they argue that a multiple measures assessment would hold more validity, especially for students of color. Chapter eight’s article, “Mind the (Linguistic) Gap: On ‘Flagging’ ESL Students at Queensborough Community College” by Charissa Che, “demonstrates the need to reconsider the complexities of ‘ESL student’ identities for more equitable writing placement” (p. 191). Altogether, section two provides examples of how to navigate externally mandated reform of writing assessment and placement from a variety of levels, from state to local to institutional policies. 

Finally, the third section, Pandemic-Precipitated Placement Reform, reveals how faculty at various colleges used the pandemic’s effects on schooling to create more equitable and ethical writing placement assessment methods. Faculty of Cuyahoga Community College, Ashlee Brand and Bridget Kriner, start this section off with their article, “Pandemic Placement at Cuyahoga Community College: A Case Study,” which acts as chapter nine. Dealing with the limitations that the pandemic placed on their college’s previous methods of writing assessment, the ACCUPLACER exam and ACT or SAT scores, the authors note how the thrown-together—and originally meant to be temporary—multiple measures assessment has had beneficial impacts not only on the student population but also for the college faculty. In chapter ten, “A Complement to Educational Reform: Directed Self-Placement (DSP) at Cochise College,” Erin Whittig of University of Arizona, Cathy Sander Matthesen of Cochise College, and Denisse Cañez of Cochise College reflect on the use of directed self-placement as the writing placement method over the course of the first eighteen months of the pandemic. During this time, it evolved from an emergency, pandemic-driven measure to a full pilot program. The final chapter of section three, “Community College Online Directed Self-Placement During the COVID-19 Pandemic” by Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, Sara Amani, and Kevin Kato of Arizona Western College, relays how pre-pandemic efforts to create a more equitable writing assessment option for the primarily multilingual student body unexpectedly became the main form of placement due to its online modality. After sharing their methodology, the authors also describe the early positive effects this method had on the placement of their students. Despite the pandemic-driven disruptions to the educational landscape being (to some extent) behind us, section three’s stories of quick pivots highlight how unexpected opportunities for positive reform should be grasped, and they provide examples of how these opportunities can be used to create space for equity and justice where it was previously pushed aside.

Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education is a collection of various ways more equitable and just writing assessment and placement practices can be implemented. For those looking to start or further reform at their own two-year institution(s), this book is a great place to start. However, it does not portray these practices in a vacuum. This book calls attention to how writing placement and its effect on both students and faculty are “always part of a broader local assessment ecology that encompasses classroom assessment practices as well as sites like supplemental instruction for accelerated learning, writing centers, exit assessments for course sequences, and assessment practices that involve writing across the curriculum” (24). The work and research being done at two-year colleges is not done in isolation, but instead can inform practices at all educational levels. This book serves as encouragement, a guide, and a call for further change for anyone looking to pursue justice and equity in writing education.

Editor’s Introduction | Winter 2022

Welcome back to the Journal of Writing Assessment’s Reading List!

The JWA Reading List has historically provided reviews of books related to writing assessment in its many forms and locales. Casting a wide net, reviews in the RL have covered texts on K-12 accountability testing, programmatic assessment in college writing programs, the history of writing assessment in the US, classroom writing assessment and alternative grading approaches, social justice in writing assessment, and more. It has also provided a space for graduate students and junior scholars to gain publication experience in a low-stakes, affirmative environment.

Since 2019, the Reading List has remained dormant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and as our former editorial team, editor Ti Macklin and editorial assistant Skyler Meeks, both stepped back. But with the help of our four new editorial assistants—Kathleen Kryger (University of Arizona), Jennifer Burke Reifman (University of California, Davis), Tiffany Smith (Georgia State University), and Sarah Stetson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)—we’re very excited to be relaunching this resource and once again reviewing new scholarship in writing assessment.

This relaunch issue focuses on recent texts related to social justice in writing assessment. We offer four reviews as well as a Special Introduction from Megan Von Bergen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville). Our four reviews for this issue include:

• Mikenna Sims’ (University of California, Davis) review of Ellen Carillo’s Hidden Inequities in Labor-based Contract Grading (2022)
• Cassandra Goff’s (University of Utah) review of Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Curzan, J. W. Hammond, Sarah Hughes, Ruth Li, Andrew Moos, Kendon Smith, Kathryn Van Zanen, Kelly L. Wheeler, and Crystal J. Zanders’s “Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness” in CCC (2021)
• Madeline Crozier’s (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) review of Deborah Crusan’s “Writing Assessment Literacy” in Research Questions in Language Education and Applied Linguistics (2021)
• Michelle Tram Nguyen’s (Bowling Green State University) review of Alfie Kohn and Susan D. Blum’s Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (2021)

As evidenced by the reviews in this issue, going forward the RL will aim to cast an even wider net by exploring not just books, but also recently published journal articles, book chapters, and other forms of scholarship. We will also be releasing bi-yearly “issues” of the RL focused on current themes in writing assessment, much like special issues in our parent journal, JWA.

We are always interested in recruiting new reviewers; you can be added to our list by filling out this form . We’re also always interested in recommendations for new texts in writing assessment to review (self-promotion is welcome!); you can contact us at [email protected] .

Special Introduction | Winter 2022

By Megan Von Bergen , University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Alternative assessment practices, especially (but not only) labor-based grading and contract grading, consistently tie it to social justice. As recently as 2019, Asao Inoue framed labor-based contract grading as a partial response to ongoing racial violence in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, interest in alternative forms of classroom assessment skyrocketed, as educators searched for ways to meet these exigencies. This shift is reflected in new publications, among them a special issue in the Journal of Writing Assessment (2020) , standalone articles in the WPA Journal (Craig 2020), and briefer posts on FEN Blog . Teachers want to adopt assessment practices that do justice, especially amid in justices.

What we know about alternative assessment practices, however, including their potential for social justice, is limited. Research on labor-based grading remains slim (Cowan 2020), often emerging from the scholar’s own teaching experiences or using unclear definitions of contract grading (Albracht et al 2018). This reality complicates educators’ efforts to connect work on labor-based grading to their local classroom and programmatic contexts, and the particular justice those spaces require. Scholarship has also challenged the assumption that alternative assessment is by nature a just practice. In some cases, scholars emphasize that if labor-based grading is used inappropriately, it can perpetuate racial injustice among teachers as well as students (Craig). In other cases, writers suggest that the focus on racial justice may gloss over other dimensions of identity and social justice, among them disability and neurodiversity (Carillo, reviewed here by Sims). This emerging trend in assessment scholarship invites a closer look at how our assessment theories play out in our classrooms and push us as teacher-scholars towards closer analysis and more nuanced uptake, to ensure our assessment choices meet the desired ends.

Assessment has the potential to be a key driver for equity in our classrooms. Where assessment historically closedthe gates to students deemed undeserving, assessment can open those same gates, creating more opportunities for students to flourish (Poe et al 2016). This is a hopeful and radical vision for writing assessment, but to meet it requires returning to, challenging, and deepening our concept of what justice among our students and fellow teachers requires, along with forging alliances with educators and administrators belonging to historically minoritized groups (Perryman-Clark 2016). This process, of learning about and taking up new methods of assessment in partnership with our colleagues, is a continual, iterative one, benefiting from ongoing engagement with scholarship.

The value of a set of reviews like those included here is to jumpstart that reflection. Reading these reviews invites us as educators, administrators, and/or researchers to ask hard questions of our assessment practices. The reviews also highlight important texts and resources, to nuance and develop our understanding of how assessment may foster – or hinder – justice in the writing classroom.

Reviews included in this collection

“Writing Assessment Literacy,” Deborah Crusan. Reviewed by Madeline Crozier.

Crozier ably situates Crusan’s work within the larger collection in which it appears –– a reference guide to research questions in language and literacy education –– and sums up both the concept of writing assessment literacy and its value for students, teachers, and administrators and supervisors. Crusan defines writing assessment literacy as a framework combining “skills and knowledge” to guide assessment practices and suggests that writing assessment literacy can help reconcile the existing gap between assessment theory and actual teacher training and classroom practice. Crozier concludes her review by summarizing the resources and research questions Crusan forwards, among them the interaction between teaching practice and theories of writing assessment, and highlights Crusan’s call for additional research. Crozier’s review of Crusan’s work is useful for scholars evaluating their own assessment literacy and/or administrators engaged in teacher training and support.

“Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness,” Gere et al. Reviewed by Cassandra Goff.

As Goff’s review notes, “Communal Justicing” calls Writing Studies to collectively accept the responsibility to be honest about its discriminatory past and work for equity across its policies and publications. Such work hinges on critical language awareness, a term which emphasizes how concepts of “proper” language use are connected to power and the need to challenge these connections in language classrooms and language education policies. Goff focuses their review on Gere et al’s revisions, centering language and language use, to the Framework for Student Success in Postsecondary Writing. Goff also notes the article’s lack of attention to critical language awareness in two-year and community colleges, pointing out that such work may be more robust given that such colleges have more diverse student populations. This article is valuable for those in a position to work with colleagues across institutions, via channels such as the NCTE and CCCC, to sustain disciplinary changes that support a more critical approach to the teaching and assessment of language. 

Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead), edited Susan Blum. Reviewed by Michelle Tram Nguyen

Nguyen’s review offers an expansive view of what makes the Ungrading collection compelling: the opportunity to hear from educators, across varied institutional contexts, about how they make ungrading work in their own contexts. As Nguyen describes, practitioners from high school teachers to computer science and chemistry professors contribute to this volume, describing their motivations for ungrading and their choices in adapting it to their classrooms. The wide range of experiences assists practitioners in connecting the text to their own experiences and developing assessment practices that center learning and student autonomy. Nguyen concludes by pointing out that the collection may be relevant for rhetoric and writing instructors looking to develop more equitable forms of assessment. 

The Hidden Inequities of Labor-Based Contract Grading, Ellen Carillo. Reviewed by Mikenna Sims.

Sims provides a thorough summary of Carillo’s key argument: that the dominant focus in labor-based grading research on raciolinguistic equity bypasses other forms of inequity, among them disability and neurodiversity, and that a more intersectional approach to student identity is required. Sims calls attention in particular to Carillo’s observation that labor-based grading takes for granted that labor requires approximately equal amounts of time or effort from students, when in reality varying socioeconomic situations, dis/abilities, and neurodiversity may alter students’ experience with the course and require more or less labor. Carillo argues this approach works against equity in labor-based contract grading, as research does not conclusively show that contracts work towards racial equity, either. Sim’s review, and Carillo’s text, are valuable for teachers and researchers interested in engaging with hard questions about how adoption of even more equitable forms of assessment may work against social justice.

As Inoue reminds us, assessment is ecological, its function(s) in our classrooms and programs shaped by people and places as well as specific practices. There is a great deal of ecological diversity in the reviews collected here: a wide range of assessment practices (Nguyen), a wide range of people, from disabled or neurodiverse students (Sims) to second language teachers (Crozier) and STEM educators (Nyguen); and a wide range of theoretical frames, from assessment literacy (Crozier) to sociolinguistics (Goff) and intersectionality (Sims). Individually, the reviews (and the texts they publicize) help composition instructors and administrators to address specific situations they may encounter in their own institutional landscape. Together, the reviews reinforce that assessment – a practice too often taken for granted as part-and-parcel of writing education – is theoretically and practically complex. To ensure assessment is equitable requires educators to make savvy decisions based on their own commitments, their students’ identities and experiences, and the institutional and geographic places they inhabit. This complexity is underscored in texts that (like Carillo’s) highlight potential injustices in assessment practices framed as socially just. Yet more thorough information about the concepts and practices key to composition assessment can only help our research and practice. If the work of assessment is to open the gates to student learning and opportunity, then these reviews provide a key for those gates, inviting further inquiry into justice and assessment, in our classrooms and across our institutions.

Works Cited

Albracht, L., Harahap, A., Pratt, A., Rodrigo, R., Russell, C. (2019). Response to Joyce Olewski Inman and Rebecca A. Powell’s “In the Absence of Grades: Dissonance and Desire in Course-Contract Classrooms.” College Composition and Communication, 71 (1), 145–58.

Blum, S. D. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead) . West Virginia University Press.

Carillo, E. C. (2021). The hidden inequities in labor-based contract grading . Utah State University Press.

Cowan, M. (2020) A legacy of grading contracts for composition. The Journal of Writing Assessment, 13 (2). http://journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?article=150 .

Craig, S. (2021). Your contract grading ain’t it. WPA Journal, 44 (3), 145–46.

Gere, A. R., Curzan, A., Hammond, J. W., Hughes, S. Li, R., Moos, A., Smith, K., Van Zanen, K., Wheeler, K. L., and Zanders, C. J. (2021). Communal justicing: Writing assessment, disciplinary infrastructure, and the case for critical language awareness. College Composition and Communication, 72 (3), 384-412.

Hennessy, J. (2022). Roll call: Labor logs as an additional method of accounting for classroom attendance. FEN Blog, Composition Studies, ​​ https://compstudiesjournal.com/2021/12/13/roll-call-labor-logs-as-an-additional-method-of-accounting-for-classroom-attendance/ .

Inoue, A.B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future . WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/inoue/ecologies.pdf .

Inoue, A.B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white supremacy? Conference on College Composition and Communication , Chicago, IL. Chair’s Address.

Poe, M., Inoue, A.B., Elliot, N. (2018). Introduction: The end of isolation. In M. Poe, A.B. Inoue, N. Elliot (Eds.), Writing assessment, social justice, and the advancement of opportunity (pp. 3–38) . WAC Clearinghouse, https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/assessment/intro.pdf .

Perryman-Clark, S. M. (2016). Who we are(n’t) assessing: Racializing language and writing assessment in writing program administration. College English, 79 (2), 206–11.

Review of Ellen C. Carillo’s The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading

Reviewed by Mikenna Sims , University of California, Davis

Carillo, E. C. (2021). The hidden inequities in labor-based contract grading . Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.

Ellen C. Carillo’s (2021) The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading offers a critique of the assessment model put forth by Asao B. Inoue (2019) in Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom . Carillo opens her introduction by naming Inoue an “invaluable leader in writing studies,” particularly as the field contends with inequitable grading practices (4). Building on the work of Inoue and others, Carillo offers a disabilities studies lens through which she explores the implications of labor-based contract grading among disabled and neurodivergent students, departing from the raciolinguistic lens that has informed much of the existing work on contract grading. Carillo concludes her introduction with a brief history of contract grading situated in Cowan’s (2020) recent review of the literature.

Carillo opens Chapter 1 by outlining a set of assumptions that underscores labor-based contract grading. Specifically, Carillo posits that labor-based contract grading inaccurately assumes that labor is a neutral measure, and that contracts that attempt to quantify student labor reinforce White, middle-class, normative, ableist, and neurotypical conceptions of labor. That is, time to labor is less available to students in certain socioeconomic classes, and the concepts of time and labor function differently for students with disabilities and who are neurodivergent. Carillo additionally calls attention to the coupling of students’ willingness to labor with their ability to labor, which is a central component of Inoue’s (2019) labor-based contract grading model. Carillo further critiques the model’s assumption in Chapter 2 and considers that while students may be willing to engage in the laboring processes of a writing course, their time and ability to do so may vary considerably. She closes the chapter by arguing that labor-based contract grading merely substitutes one standard of assessment for another, and that the normative, laboring body remains at the center of labor-based grading contracts.

In Chapter 3, Carillo highlights students’ significant and growing experiences with anxiety and depression, exacerbated in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. Carillo contends that labor-based contract grading creates a standard of labor that excludes students experiencing heightened states of anxiety and depression and goes on to problematize the contract negotiation process Inoue (2019) proposes as a way for instructors to invite students to define important terms and labor expectations of a course contract. These negotiation processes, Carillo argues, place the responsibility of disclosing and requesting accommodations on disabled and neurodivergent students, and are reactive instead of proactive.

Students’ intersectional identities are central in Chapter 4, throughout which Carillo considers the ways in which multiply-marginalized students are disadvantaged in labor-based assessment ecologies. Further, she argues that labor-based grading contracts can easily revert to instruments that measure the quality of student writing, and that asking students to put more labor into their coursework is codified language that implies students are producing work that is of subpar quality. Carillo praises Kryger & Zimmerman (2020) for their intentionally intersectional approach to labor-based contract grading. She particularly values their attention to denaturalizing White supremacy, nonnormative conceptions of time and effort, as well as their emphasis on flexibility in assessment. Carillo concludes this chapter by highlighting the importance of conversations such as those put forth by Kryger & Zimmerman to “recognize and include the widest possible range of modes of learning and being” (42).

Throughout Chapter 5, Carillo considers the effectiveness of grading contracts across local assessment ecologies. After providing a brief overview of several recent studies on contract grading, she turns her attention to Inoue’s (2012) “Grading contracts: Assessing their effectiveness on different racial formations,” and Inoue’s (2019) Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom . Carillo, upon reexamining the data Inoue provides in these two texts, reasons that the students of color in Inoue’s classes seem to be doing more labor than their White counterparts but are not rewarded for it, suggesting that the philosophy that informs labor-based contract grading may be overestimating the equalizing power of labor and underestimating the importance of intersectionality. Carillo, echoing Cowan (2020), concludes Chapter 5 by issuing a call for large-scale studies that examine the effectiveness of labor-based grading contracts.

Carillo concludes Hidden Inequities by rearticulating that labor-based grading contracts are designed to best serve idealized, able-bodied, and neurotypical students. Carillo proposes engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative method of assessment in which students are offered a broad range of ways to demonstrate engagement in the course. She reasons that engagement-based grading contracts afford students the flexibility and agency of deciding which methods of engagement are most suitable to them at a given time, which works to bridge the gap between student willingness and ability. Carillo additionally suggests that using a translingual lens to assess student writing, and creating individualized student contracts, may better attend to multiply-marginalized and linguistically diverse students. She ends by reminding writing studies scholars that constructing equitable, student-centered assessment methods is a process, and not solely an outcome to be achieved.

Cowan, M. (2020). A legacy of grading contracts for composition. Journal of Writing Assessment , 13 (2). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j28w67h .

Inoue, A. B. (2012). Grading contracts: Assessing their effectiveness on different racial formations. In A.B. Inoue & M. Poe (Eds.), Race and writing assessment (pp. 79-94). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom . Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse. Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/labor/ .

Kryger, K., & Zimmerman, G.X. (2020). Neurodivergence and intersectionality in labor-based grading contracts. Journal of Writing Assessment , 13 (2). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4v65z263 .

Review of Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness

Reviewed by Cassandra Goff , University of Utah

In “Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness” (2021), Gere, Curzan, Hammond, Hughes, Li, Moos, Sith, Zanen, Wheeler, and Zanders show that the work towards critical language awareness and social justice needs continual improvements from the local to the institutional level. Arguing for a more stringent effort towards improvements for justice on an institutional level, the authors remind the Writing Studies field of their community responsibility for critical language awareness and justicing.

Drawing upon Swain’s definition of ‘languaging’, Gere et al. discuss how “justicing implies a process of conscious, iterative, effort that is not achieved all at once, but rather depends upon the choices we continually make” (p. 385). Communal justicing is the ongoing and collective project of working towards justice. In other words, justicing is the action verb while justice is the noun. The authors constantly re-emphasize that the work for critical language awareness and communal justicing is the responsibility of the whole community. Changes to institutional infrastructure cannot occur without everyone working with the same common goal in mind.

Gere et al. identify that students have a key role within the Writing Studies community as well. “By promoting critical language awareness as a matter of policy, we help to ensure that the writing classroom is a space for teachers and students to participate in communal justicing,” (p. 394). Gere et al. imagine all students form a rhetorical understanding of ‘proper’ and ‘incorrect’ written conventions and language varieties to help them inform and change social hierarchies and implications. 

The authors argue that revising key elements of institutional infrastructures is necessary for promoting critical language awareness and communal justicing within the field overall as well as everyday choices and improvement within composition classrooms. “We take the term ‘communal justicing’ to designate something more than local efforts to revise aspects of assessment that contribute to unjust outcomes for students” (p. 387). Individual local change is not sufficient.

Drawing upon previous scholarship by Duffy, Gilyard, Inoue, Wardle, and others, Gere et al. argue for the field’s common vision to be shaped by communal justicing.  Starting by making improvements towards communal justicing within the field’s past policies and publications, scholars and practitioners within the field of Writing Studies must focus on disciplinary memory of language history, policy, and discrimination “Reimagining our guiding documents so that they advance critical language awareness is one such infrastructural intervention – one such means of justicing,” (p. 386). The authors propose significant revision to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing ; a guiding document informs curriculum development for Writing Studies instructors in both college and high-school contexts. The focus of Gere et al. revisions to the Framework document prioritizes language, noting the absence of the word itself from the original publication.

Transparency is a necessity in communal justicing work when creating and revising guiding documents within the field. The Framework was produced in 2011 by a collation of authors from the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP). Gere et al. note the Framework “hides the identity of those who consider and determine what is correct, or appropriate” (p. 396) for the formal rules and information guidelines of writing conventions.

Gere et al. subtly nod towards the need for everyone within the Writing Studies field, not only a few assigned individuals, to prioritize critical language awareness and communal justicing. They mention many of the conversations within NCTE and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) that focus on social justice and critical language awareness “have been initiated and led by antiracist educators of color, as well as interest and advocacy groups…” (p, 389). The necessary choices and continuous work of communal justicing is not the responsibility of people of color alone; it’s the responsibility of the entire Writing Studies community.  

The authors remind those within the Writing Studies field that communal justicing work is not in the past; it is work that must be continuously prioritized now and improved upon in the future. Drawing upon Smitherman, Gere et al. “the purpose of communal justicing is… to make these improvement efforts so habitual within the field that it becomes difficult to imagine disciplinary participation without them,” (p. 402). Their call to those within the Writing Studies field to continually choose to make efforts towards critical language awareness and communal justicing is strengthened when the authors reaffirm knowledge that inaction does not change or challenge the systematic powers and privileges at play.

In referencing NCTE and CCCC primarily within “Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness”, Gere et al. miss the opportunity to evaluate the Two-Year College English Association’s (TYCA) role towards critical language awareness and communal justicing work within the Writing Studies field. This text leaves room to consider how community colleges are already and continuously working towards communal justicing with, sometimes extremely, varying student populations.

Throughout the various contexts of the Writing Studies field, Gere et al. mention how even though multimodality is becoming increasingly popular within composition classrooms, language-based texts are the standard for assessment ideologies. This juxtaposition calls for the Writing Studies field to evaluate the role of multimodality within the work of communal justicing, especially in relation to assessment.

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Inoue, A. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future . WAC Clearinghouse.

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Wardle, E., Adler-Kassner, L., Alexander, J., Elliot, N., Hammond, J.W., Poe, M., Rhodes, J., Womack, A.M. (2019). Recognizing the limits of threshold concept theory. In L. Adler-Kassner and E. Wardle (Eds.), (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy (pp. 15-35). Utah State University Press.

Review of Deborah Cursan’s “Writing Assessment Literacy”

Reviewed by Madeline Crozier , The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Crusan, D. (2021). Writing assessment literacy. In H. Mohebbi & C. Coombe (Eds.), Research questions in language education and applied linguistics: A reference guide  (pp. 431-435). Springer Texts in Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79143-8

In any composition classroom, writing assessment facilitates student learning, literacy acquisition, and writing development. Effective writing assessment is necessary for meaningful teaching and learning. However, teacher preparation programs and writing pedagogy education curricula may lack a focus on assessment, leaving instructors without enough experience, preparation, or training to assess student writing in the classroom. This is the practical and theoretical problem that drives Deborah Crusan’s emphasis on writing assessment literacy (WAL) in her contribution to the comprehensive collection Research Questions in Language Education and Applied Linguistics: A Reference Guide , an academic tome edited by Hassan Mohebbi and Christine Coombe (2021). In her five-page reference entry—one among 152 research topics in the reference guide—Crusan concisely introduces the WAL framework, identifies relevant research questions, and suggests additional resources. This brief, accessible resource, along with many useful additions to the collection, offers a starting point for assessment researchers, scholars, and practitioners to begin lines of inquiry into WAL development. Taken altogether, the collection provides a rare resource for scholars seeking exigencies for meaningful writing research, and Crusan’s addition highlights the crucial, yet often overlooked, impact of WAL on writing assessment.

As Crusan (2021) explains, WAL refers to a construct that helps explain how writing instructors’ assessment knowledge and beliefs inform their assessment practices. Some of the skills and knowledge encompassed by WAL include “the ability of teachers to create effective assignments and their accompanying scoring tools, to understand the reasons for assessing their students’ writing, . . . and to carry on their assessment duties ethically and conscientiously” (p. 431). Crusan (2021) underscores that WAL guides instructors to make informed decisions about their assessment practices. Because assessment impacts student learning in significant ways, instructors need to be adequately trained to deliver effective and ethical writing assessment. Crusan (2021) notably highlights the “good assessment practices” of “fairness, accountability, and transparency” (p. 431) as necessary for classroom writing assessment and further suggests that instructors need to know how to create “effective, ethical rubrics” (p. 432). Although several decades of writing assessment scholarship has developed theories and best practices for effective writing assessment, this research does not always appear in teacher training programs or shape writing assessment practice. The ongoing divide between research, theory, and practice accounts for this misalignment and motivates more research to explore how instructors develop WAL to enhance writing assessment for teachers and, subsequently, their students. Crusan (2021) aptly navigates these dichotomies to demonstrate how researchers can bridge the gap between assessment theory and practice through the study of WAL development.

After defining WAL and situating the construct as a response to this research gap, Crusan (2021) provides ten research questions to guide studies of WAL development (p. 432). These questions are extremely useful for researchers and scholars who want to contribute to the field’s knowledge about writing assessment and teacher training. For instance, one of the research questions is, “What is the impact of teaching experience on writing assessment knowledge, beliefs, and practices?” (Crusan, 2021, p. 433). This question directs researchers to understand how different amounts and types of teaching experience shape instructors’ beliefs and knowledge about writing assessment. The question could generate a greater understanding about what types of experiences and training can best support instructors as they develop WAL. Another particularly useful research question is, “How can teaching be enhanced through writing assessment literacy?” (Crusan, 2021, p. 433). A research question like this understands that WAL does not only impact the instructors who deliver assessment but the students who receive assessment. This question points to the potential of understanding how instructors’ WAL shapes their assessment practices which subsequently impact their students. Crusan (2021), a leading researcher on second language writing assessment, writing teacher education, and WAL, conclusively argues the need for more research on this topic. She centers many of the questions around the experiences of second language writing teachers, but the research questions are adaptable to a range of contexts and institutions. By presenting ten unique avenues for inquiry, Crusan (2021) firmly establishes the importance of studying WAL.

The reference concludes with two pages of suggested resources for scholars who want to explore some of the most prevalent WAL research studies to date. Crusan (2021) recommends five resources, all written since 2015, with annotations that summarize the key points of each article. These articles include Crusan and colleagues’ 2016 study in which they surveyed 702 writing instructors to build a knowledge base for how instructors develop WAL. The additional resources connect some of the related terminology used to refer to WAL, such as language assessment literacy and teacher assessment literacy . The sources also explore WAL development for instructors across K-12 and higher education contexts in both U.S. and international educational settings. Ultimately, Crusan’s reference firmly establishes WAL as an imperative framework for writing program administrators, teacher trainers, and educators to understand. With Crusan’s reference entry as a resource, researchers can begin multifaceted inquiries into WAL and develop the field’s understanding of the importance and value of writing assessment in the composition classroom.

Higher Education, Academic Writing Assessment and Formative Feedback

• First Online: 12 September 2020

Cite this chapter

• Prithvi N. Shrestha 2  

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In this first chapter, I begin by introducing the key aspects of dynamic assessment research discussed in the book and presenting an outline of the chapters. Key studies on academic writing and formative feedback on academic writing and debates around academic writing assessment in higher education are reviewed in order to contextualise the research reported in the book. The chapter shows that there are still concerns about supporting students in higher education with their academic writing for their success in the discipline of their choice. It briefly introduces dynamic assessment as an alternative assessment approach to academic writing assessment in higher education to address these concerns which will be taken up in the rest of the book.

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It is also important to acknowledge that there is Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education journal, dedicated to improving assessment and evaluation in higher education. Many studies reviewed in this chapter come from it and focus on student learning.

TOEFL is an acronym for Test of English as a Foreign Language developed by Educational Testing Services in the US. The current version, TOEFL iBT, is delivered over the internet and is used to assess test takers’ English language proficiency in an academic context. It has a Writing section in addition to Listening, Speaking and Reading.

IELTS refers to International English Language Testing System developed by University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations, British Council and IDP: IELTS Australia. IELTS Academic includes Listening, Speaking, Academic Reading and Academic Writing. It is for test-takers who want to study undergraduate and postgraduate degrees or seek professional registration (e.g., medical doctor) in an English speaking context.

The terms tutor and teacher are used interchangeably in this book.

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Shrestha, P.N. (2020). Higher Education, Academic Writing Assessment and Formative Feedback. In: Dynamic Assessment of Students’ Academic Writing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55845-1_1

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Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style   http://intraspection.org

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The  Journal für Schreibwissenschaft  (JoSch, formerly Journal der Schreibberatung) covers the entire spectrum of topics in writing didactics and research. While it focuses on the German-speaking higher education area, it is open to all (educational) institutions where writing and writing is reflected.

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Journal of Basic Writing https://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/

JBW is a publication of the Conference on Basic Writing. The Clearinghouse hosts the archives.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication http://jbt.sagepub.com/

The Journal of Business and Technical Communication publishes research-based articles on problems and trends in written, oral and electronic communication in all areas of business, science and government. It was created in 1986 to meet the growing demand for research and analysis in issues such as: managerial communication, collaborative writing, ethics of business communication, technical writing pedagogy, gender differences in writing, international communication, graphic design, and ethnography of corporate culture.

Journal of Business Communication http://job.sagepub.com/

Journal of Business Communication (JBC), peer-reviewed and published quarterly, provides rigorous original research that contributes to the knowledge and theory of business communication as a distinct, multifaceted field, approached through the administrative disciplines, the liberal arts, and the social sciences. JBC is the official publication of the Association for Business Communication.

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication http://jcmc.indiana.edu/

The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) is a web-based, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its focus is social science research on computer-mediated communication via the Internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless technologies. Within that general purview, the journal is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines. Acceptable formats for submission include original research articles, meta-analyses of prior research, synthesizing literature surveys, and proposals for special issues.

Journal of Creative Writing Studies https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/

Journal of Creative Writing Studies is a peer reviewed, open access journal. It publishes research that examines the teaching, practice, theory, and history of creative writing. This scholarship makes use of theories and methodologies from a variety of disciplines. The journal editors believe knowledge is best constructed in an open conversation among diverse voices and multiple perspectives. With this in mind, they actively seek to include work from marginalized and underrepresented scholars. Journal of Creative Writing Studies is dedicated to the idea that humanities research ought to be accessible and available to all.

Journal for Expanded Perspectives on Learning   https://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/

The Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL), an official assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, provides a common ground for theorists, researchers, and practitioners to explore ideas on the subject; to participate in programs and projects on it; to integrate these efforts with others in related disciplines: to keep abreast of activities along these lines of inquiry; and to promote scholarship and publications of these activities. The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning , JAEPL , meets this need. It provides a forum to encourage research, theory, and classroom practice involving expanded concepts of language. It contributes to a sense of community in which scholars and educators from pre-school through the university exchange points of view and cutting-edge approaches to teaching and learning. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies of learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals.

Journal of Global Literacies, Technology, and Emerging Pedagogies http://jogltep.com/

JOGLTEP focuses on glocal (global + local) literacies, cross-cultural networked communities, digital global learning communities, trans-border and trans-national networked pedagogies, geopolitical dynamics of education, digital learning ecologies, and knowledge- and information-based societies.

Journal of Interactive Media in Education http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/

The aims of JIME are, among others, to foster a multidisciplinary and intellectually rigorous debate on the theoretical and practical aspects of interactive media in education, to clarify the cognitive, social and cultural issues raised by the use of interactive media in education, to radically improve teaching and learning through better interactive media, and to publish leading international research on the theories, practices and experiences in the field.

Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu

The Journal , which is committed first and foremost to teaching and learning, is intended – both in process and in product – to provide opportunities to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practice.

Journal of Literacy Innovation https://journalofliteracyinnovation.weebly.com

The Journal of Literacy Innovation is a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to share ideas about innovative practices in literacy education with K-12 teachers and college-level teacher educators. It focuses on innovative, practical ideas that offer new insights to the field of literacy instruction and can be applied to the classroom.

Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics   http://journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/

The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics , or JOMR , is a completely online, open-access journal featuring essays and other items that examine multimodality in all of its cultural, material, temporal, and pedagogical manifestations.

Journal of Pedagogic Development http://www.beds.ac.uk/jpd

The Journal of Pedagogic Development (JPD) is a publication of the University of Bedfordshire Centre for Learning Excellence. Its focus is on teaching, learning and assessment.

Journal of Response to Writing   https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/journalrw/

The Journal of Response to Writing publishes papers based on research, theory, and/or practice that meaningfully contribute to an understanding of how response practices lead to better writing. Its purposes are to provide a venue for theorizing and reporting ground-breaking research on response to writing; invite writing theorists, researchers, and practitioners to a venue to share their work with one another and colleagues in adjacent fields; and provide new or inexperienced teachers with immediate suggestions for use in giving, encouraging, or managing responses to their students’ writing.

Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/rpcg/

The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization publishes articles on the theory, practice, and teaching of professional communication in critical global contexts.

Journal of Second Language Writing http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-second-language-writing/

The Journal of Second Language Writing , a refereed international journal appearing four times a year, features theoretically grounded reports of research and discussion of central issues in second language and foreign language writing and writing instruction.

Journal of Teaching Writing http://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/teachingwriting

JTW is a refereed journal for classroom teachers and researchers at all academic levels whose interest or emphasis is the teaching of writing. Appearing semi-annually, JTW publishes articles on the theory, practice, and teaching of writing throughout the curriculum. Each issue covers a range of topics from composition theory and discourse analysis to curriculum development and innovative teaching techniques.

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication   https://journals.sagepub.com/home/jtw

Published quarterly,  JTWC  publishes peer-reviewed research on communications-related issues, as well as relevant materials on the teaching of technical and professional writing and reviews of recently published books. For over forty years, the journal has served as a major professional and scholarly journal for practitioners and teachers of most functional forms of communication.

Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning http://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, JAEPL , provides a forum to encourage research, theory, and classroom practice involving expanded concepts of language. It contributes to a sense of community in which scholars and educators from pre-school through the university exchange points of view and cutting-edge approaches to teaching and learning. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies of learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals.

Journal of Writing Analytics   https://wac.colostate.edu/jwa/

The Journal of Writing Analytics  ( Analytics ) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by the WAC Clearinghouse. Additional support for the journal is provided by Ohio State University. Conceptualized as a multidisciplinary field, Writing Analytics is defined as the study of communication processes and genres as they occur in digital educational environments. The journal operates at the intersection of educational measurement, massive data analysis, digital learning ecologies, and ethical philosophy. Intended to give voice to an emerging community, the journal is devoted to programs of research providing evidence of fair, reliable, and valid analytics. Dedicated to application, such multidisciplinary research will demonstrate its usefulness to educational stakeholders as they expand opportunities for diverse learners.

Journal of Writing Assessment https://escholarship.org/uc/jwa

The Journal of Writing Assessment provides a forum for the publication of manuscripts from a variety of disciplines and perspectives that address topics in writing assessment. Articles address assessment-related topics including grading and response, program assessment, historical perspectives on assessment, assessment theory, and educational measurement as well as other relevant topics. Book reviews of recent publications related to writing assessment and annotated bibliographies of current issues in writing assessment also appear in the journal.

Journal of Writing Research   http://www.jowr.org/

The  Journal of Writing Research  (JoWR) is an international peer reviewed journal that publishes papers that describe scientific study studies of the processes by which writing is produced and or by which it can be effectively taught.

Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/

Kairos is a refereed online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. Each issue presents varied perspectives on special topics, typically in the form of "webtexts" -- texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. These webtexts include scholarly examinations of large-scale issues related to special topics, individual and collaborative reviews of books and media, news and announcements of interest, interactive exchanges about previous Kairos publications, and extended interviews with leading scholars.

KB: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society  http://kbjournal.org/

KBJ publishes original scholarship that addresses, applies, extends, repurposes, or challenges the writings of Kenneth Burke, which include but are not limited to the major books and hundreds of articles by Burke, as well as the growing corpus of research material about Burke.

Language and Learning Across the Curriculum   wac.colostate.edu/llad/

In 2004, LLAD merged with the online journal Academic.Writing to form Across the Disciplines , published by the WAC Clearinghouse. The archives of LLAD are available at the Clearinghouse. LLAD published articles that make connections between the discourses, disciplines, and locations covered by the journal, general issues of language use, classroom practices, curricula, learning theory, critical thinking, composition theory, and educational technology from either a theoretical perspective or as it appears in single or multi-disciplinary programs at the undergraduate or graduate level. Writers were encouraged to address these topics from diverse critical stances including but not limited to: ethnographic research, cognitive approaches, feminist and gender-based perspectives, rhetorical theory, genre theory, and cultural and international studies.

Language Arts https://ncte.org/resources/journals/language-arts/

Language Arts is the official journal of the Elementary Section of the National Council of Teachers of English. It has been published since 1924. Language Arts is a professional journal for elementary and middle school teachers and teacher educators. It provides a forum for discussions on all aspects of language arts learning and teaching, primarily as they relate to children in pre-kindergarten through the eighth grade. Issues discuss both theory and classroom practice, highlight current research, and review children's and young adolescent literature, as well as classroom and professional materials of interest to language arts educators.

Literacy in Composition Studies http://www.licsjournal.org

Literacy in Composition Studies is a refereed open-access online journal sponsoring scholarly activity at the nexus of literacy and composition studies. The journal publishes work that analyzes the connections and disconnections among writing, reading, and interpretation, inviting examination of the ways in which literacy constitutes writer, context, and act. The journal publishes both long-form articles and book reviews and shorter essays as part of an on-going symposium.

Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies https://latinxwritingandrhetoricstudies.com/

Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies  is the professional journal for the college scholar-teacher interested in both national and international literacy events dealing with Latinx Communities, Diaspora, and Identity and Cultural Practices.  LWRS  publishes articles about literature, rhetoric-composition, critical theory, creative writing theory and pedagogy, linguistics, literacy, reading theory, pedagogy, and professional issues related to the teaching and creation of Latinx epistemologies. Issues may also include review essays. 

MENA Writing Studies Journal https://www.aub.edu.lb/MENA-Writing-Studies-Journal/Pages/default.aspx

MENA Writing Studies is a refereed journal publishing research about the teaching of writing, composition, and rhetoric in the Middle East and North Africa. The journal's goal is to share the experiences and voices of instructors and scholars whose work and research is relevant to the region while also reflecting the diversity and complexity the region itself, as it traverses geographical, linguistic, and national borders. The journal provides a space for theoretical and pedagogical discussions among those teaching writing in the MENA, working with students from the MENA, or in some way associated with the MENA.

Northern California Writing Centers Association Newsletter https://sites.google.com/view/ncwca/home/newsletter

The Newsletter  is published by the  Northern California Writing Centers Association, a non-profit educational organization that provides support, encourages scholarship, and promotes community among writing center professionals.

The Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies http://www.ojcmt.net

The Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies (OJCMT) is an international, rigorously peer-reviewed journal in the field of Communication and its related fields. OJCMT is interested in research not only on Theory and Practice of Communication and Media Studies but also new trends and developments, Communication in Education, Visual Communication and Design, Integrated Marketing Communicationand Advertising. OJCMT is published four times a year in January, April, July and October. Each article is reviewed by two blind reviewers from an internationally recognized pool of reviewers.

Online Literacies Open Resource   https://gsole.org/olor

The  Online Literacies Open Resource  is one of two publication venues sponsored by the Global Society for Online Literacy Educators.  The goal of this peer-reviewed journal is to publish relatively brief and practical pedagogical strategies. 

Open Words Journal https://wac.colostate.edu/openwords

Open Words: Access and English Studies is a journal dedicated to publishing articles focusing on political, professional, and pedagogical issues related to teaching composition, reading, ESL, creative writing, and literature to open admissions and non-mainstream student populations.

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture  https://www.dukeupress.edu/pedagogy

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture  is an innovative journal that aims to build and sustain a vibrant discourse around teaching in English studies.

The Peer Review   http://thepeerreview-iwca.org

The Peer Review is a fully online, open-access, multimodal scholarly journal that promotes the work of emerging writing center researchers. In particular, it targets graduate/undergraduate/high school researchers. While the journal welcomes writing center directors and administrators as co-authors, the journal’s overall purpose is to forward the work of new voices in the field.

Peitho   https://cfshrc.org/peitho-journal/

Peitho  is a peer-reviewed journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. The journal exists to support the Coalition’s mission as a “learned society composed of women scholars who are committed to research in the history of rhetoric and composition.” The journal, like the Coalition, promotes and fosters collaboration and communication in these areas of specialization.  Peitho  seeks to encourage, advance, and publish original research in the history of rhetoric and composition and thereby support scholars and students within our profession.

Philosophy & Rhetoric http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_pr.html

Philosophy and Rhetoric focuses on relations between philosophy and rhetoric. Topics include the connections between logic and rhetoric, the philosophical aspects of argumentation (including argumentation in philosophy itself), philosophical views on the nature of rhetoric among historical figures and during historical periods, philosophical analyses of the relation to rhetoric of other areas of human culture and thought, and psychological and sociological studies of rhetoric with a strong philosophical emphasis.

Poroi   https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/

Poroi , sponsored by the  Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry , publishes articles on the rhetoric of knowledge production in and across academic disciplines; how knowledge flows between technical, public, and personal spheres of discourse; and how communication media affect argumentation, its dissemination, and reception.

Postmodern Culture Electronic Journal http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/

Founded in 1990 as an experiment in scholarly publishing on the Internet, Postmodern Culture identifies itself as "the leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary cultures, publishing the work of such noted authors and critics as Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Robbins, bell hooks, and Susan Howe."

Praxis: A W r iting Center Journal   http://www.praxisuwc.com/

Praxis is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published triannually by the University Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. As a forum for writing-center practitioners, Praxis publishes articles from writing-center consultants, administrators, and others concerned with issues related to writing-center training, consulting, labor, administration, and initiatives.

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society http://www.presenttensejournal.org

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is a peer-reviewed, blind-refereed, online journal dedicated to exploring contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues through a rhetorical lens.

Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory    https://www.facebook.com/groups/110657315628876/

On its Facebook group page, Pre/Text describes itself using a quote from the ADE Journal: ". . . the closest thing that the profession has to a John Waters' Film." Pre/Text has a long and storied history within the field, mixing cutting edge thinking with controversial forays into key issues. Learn more about the journal on Facebook .

Process: Journal of Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Scholarship https://www.processjmus.org Process provides an online space for undergraduate writers across the disciplines to share their work outside of the context and constraints of the college classroom. Each issue of Process centers on a topic of contemporary interest to a global audience, fostering critical conversations that traverse disciplinary, cultural, and national borders.

Programmatic Perspectives  http://cptsc.org/journal/

Programmatic Perspectives is the journal of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. It publishes articles related to programmatic issues in technical, professional, and/or scientific communication.

Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments http://thepromptjournal.com/index.php/prompt

Prompt  is a biannual, refereed online journal that publishes academic writing assignments. Prompt publishes assignments directed at both undergraduate and graduate students from all academic disciplines. Its mission is to disseminate a mode of intellectual work that is too rarely circulated in public venues, and it hopes to contribute to the scholarly study of writing assignments in the field of writing studies. The editors of Prompt  also believe that by publishing excellent and innovative writing assignments, the journal can serves as both a resource and a site of engagement for faculty who incorporate writing in their teaching.

Queen City Writers  https://qc-writers.com/

Established in 2012,  Queen City Writers  is a refereed journal that publishes essays and multimedia work by undergraduate students affiliated with any post-secondary institution. The journal also publishes reviews, snapshots of writers, and comments. Issues are published twice a year in fall and spring.

Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric  https://reflectionsjournal.net  

Reflections , a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on writing, service-learning and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of essays, empirical studies, community writing, student work, interviews and reviews in a format that brings together emerging scholars and leaders in the fields of community-based writing and civic engagement.

Research in Online Literacy Education   http://www.roleolor.org/  

Research in Online Literacy Education  ( ROLE ) is a peer-reviewed digital journal published by the  Global Society of Online Literacy Educators .  ROLE  publishes original research and scholarship in literacy-based online education.  The mission of  ROLE  is to promote diversity, inclusivity, and access in online literacy education; to build a platform for scholarly conversation that connects reading, writing, and digital composition; to support multimedia scholarship and publish work that includes multimodal forms of digital research and presentation; and to bring together researchers and practitioners across the disciplines to improve the teaching of disciplinary content using multiple literacies.

Research in the Teaching of English https://ncte.org/resources/journals/research-in-the-teaching-of-english/

Research in the Teaching of English is a multidisciplinary journal composed of original research and scholarly essays on the relationships between language teaching and learning at all levels, preschool through adult. Articles reflect a variety of methodologies and address issues of pedagogical relevance related to the content, context, process, and evaluation of language learning.

Rhetoric & Public Affairs   http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/171

Rhetoric & Public Affairs  is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the history, theory, and criticism of public discourse.

Rhetoric of Health & Medicine   http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/rhm/

Rhetoric of Health & Medicine  brings together humanities and social scientific research traditions in a rhetorically focused journal to allow scholars to build new interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and insights that can impact our understanding of health, illness, healing, and wellness.

Rhetnet: A Dialogic Publishing (ad)venture https://wac.colostate.edu/rhetnet/

RhetNet introduces itself as "a concerted effort to see what publishing on the net might be in its 'natural' form. Without leaving our print heritage behind entirely, we want to adapt to the net rather than only adapting net publishing to print-based convention." An archived version of this groundbreaking journal is housed in the Clearinghouse.

Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture https://msupress.org/ journals/rhetoric-politics- and-culture/

Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture embraces a pluralistic approach to rhetorical scholarship. The journal is open to a variety of methodological approaches, from close textual and/or historical analysis to critical/cultural, ethnographic, performative, artistic, and/or theoretical work. The journal invites scholarship on rhetorics of marginalization, structure, materiality, and power; politics, advocacy, and activism; and beyond. Foremost to its mission is featuring perspectives that question in/justice, in/equity, power, and democracy and that attend to interlocking structures of power within their geopolitical and historical contexts. This journal also invites rhetorical scholarship that archives, documents, theorizes, or participates in forms of individual and collective public interventions, advocacy, activism, and resistance to such structures.

Rhetoric Review http://www.rhetoricreview.com/

Rhetoric Review: A Journal of Rhetoric and Composition is a scholarly interdisciplinary journal publishing in all areas of rhetoric and writing and providing a professional forum for its readers to consider and discuss current topics and issues. The journal publishes manuscripts that explore the breadth and depth of the discipline, including history, theory, writing, praxis, technical/professional communication, philosophy, rhetorical criticism, cultural studies, multiple literacies, technology, literature, public address, graduate education, and professional issues.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly http://associationdatabase.com/aws/RSA/pt/sp/rsq

Published by the Rhetoric Society of America, Rhetoric Society Quarterly publishes articles on all aspects of rhetoric, including theory, history, criticism, and pedagogy.

Rhetorica http://rh.ucpress.edu/

Rhetorica's articles, book reviews and bibliographies examine the theory and practice of rhetoric in all periods and languages and their relationship with poetics, philosophy, religion, and law.

RhetTech Journal https://www.jmu.edu/wrtc/students/undergraduate/rhet-tech.shtml

RhetTech  showcases exemplary work being done in undergraduate writing, rhetoric, and technical communication courses around the country. This journal is run by young scholars in James Madison University ’s School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication.

Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal   https://sparkactivism.com

Spark  is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal published annually. It provides a forum for activist students, teachers, and researchers in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies to articulate the public and disciplinary value of their social justice pursuits.

Sweetland Writing Center Newsletter https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/alumni-friends/newsletters.html

Published by the University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center, this electronic newsletter provides access to articles relevant to writing center and WAC practices.

Syllabus   http://www.syllabusjournal.org/

Syllabus publishes original syllabi, assessment instruments, assignments and activities, and articles related to college teaching. The editors observe, "A good syllabus is a piece of original scholarship; a great one is also an art form. A research or theory paper go through peer review process to be recognized and validated; the same process should be available to course materials. This is a small step towards taking teaching as seriousely as we take research."

Teaching English in the Two-Year College https://ncte.org/resources/journals/teaching-english-in-the-two-year-college/

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. The journal seeks articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. TETYC also publishes articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of professional concern.

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/wte/

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education is a peer reviewed journal focusing on issues of writing teacher education – the development, education, and mentoring of prospective, new, and experienced teachers of writing at all levels. The journal draws from composition studies – writing program administrators, writing across-the-curriculum specialists, and other teaching mentors; English education – including voices from secondary and elementary teacher educators at both the graduate and undergraduate levels; and from teacher educators from K-12 settings - including leaders and mentors in the National Writing Project and those in high school, middle school, and elementary school English leadership positions.

Technical Communication and Social Justice   https://techcommsocialjustice.org TCSJ , an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, focuses on considerations of social justice in the research, teaching, and practice of technical communication and professional communication.  TCSJ  publishes articles—empirical research, pedagogical approaches, case studies, integrative literature reviews, workplace studies, etc.—that advance themes (1) exploring the systems and structures that legitimize and sustain injustice and/or (2) redressing injustice and/or enacting social justice in spheres of technical communication work.

Technical Communication Quarterly https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/htcq20/current

Technical Communication Quarterly is a scholarly journal devoted to the teaching, study, and practice of technical communication in academic, scientific, technical, governmental, and business/industrial fields. Access to the journal's Web site requires free registration.

Trace: A Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology   http://tracejournal.net/ Trace  is an online, refereed, open-access journal that publishes interdisciplinary research at the intersections of writing studies, media studies, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. The journal considers the material and ethical impacts of media in all forms with specific interest in scholarship that theorizes the confluences of technology, culture, and life.

The WAC Journal https://wac.colostate.edu/journal/

Published by Clemson University, Parlor Press, and the WAC Clearinghouse,  The WAC Journal  is an annual collection of articles by educators about their WAC ideas and WAC experiences. It is a journal of practical ideas and pertinent theory.

WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship   https://wlnjournal.org/

Formerly the  Writing Lab Newsletter ,  WLN  is a forum for exchanging ideas and information about writing centers in high schools, colleges, and universities. Articles focus on challenges in tutoring theory and methodology, handling ESL issues, directing a writing center, training tutors, adding computers, designing and expanding centers, and using tutorial theory and pedagogy. In addition to articles, issues contain conference announcements, book reviews, professional news, and a column by and for tutors.  WLN  is published bi-monthly from September to June.

Works & Days http://www.worksanddays.net/

Works & Days provides a scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, especially as they are impacted by the transition from print to electronic environments. Each issue of the journal is organized around specific inquiries conducted as shared disciplinary or post-disciplinary research projects.

WPA: Writing Program Administration http://wpacouncil.org/aws/CWPA/pt/sp/journal

WPA is a publication of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. It publishes articles and essays concerning the organization, administration, practices, and aims of college and university writing programs.

Writers: Craft & Context https://journals.shareok.org/writersccjournal

Writers: Craft & Context is an open-access interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide array of material focused on writers: the work they do, the contexts in which they compose and circulate their work, how they are impacted by policies and pedagogies (broadly conceived) and how they develop across the lifespan. The editors invite contributions from a range of academic fields such as writing studies, cultural studies, education, psychology, sociology, literature and modern languages as well as from community experts outside academia, including program leaders, activists, volunteers, artists, and others who see, support, and do the work of writing in non-academic contexts.

Writing & Pedagogy   https://journal.equinoxpub.com/WAP

Writing & Pedagogy  seeks to provide a broad-ranging, internationally oriented forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge focused on the nature of writing and the teaching of writing. It is innovative in being both international in scope and in spanning across all levels of education, from K-12 through doctoral level.

Writing@Center http://wac.gmu.edu/program/newsletter/

Published once a semester by George Mason University's WAC Program, the newsletter features articles describing "best practices" in courses across the university; tips on teaching with writing; discussions of issues related to responding to, evaluating, and assessing student writing; tutors' observations on sessions with their UWC clients; and summaries of brown bag discussions on WAC topics.

Writing Center Journal https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/wcj/

The Writing Center Journal is an official publication of the International Writing Centers Association , which is an Affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. WCJ is published twice a year, in the fall/winter and spring/summer. The journal's primary purpose is to publish articles, reviews, and announcements of interest to writing center professionals and to those forging connections between writing centers and the wider arenas of rhetoric and composition studies.

The Writing Instructor http://www.writinginstructor.org/

The Writing Instructor is a peer-reviewed journal, publishing in print since 1981 and on the Internet since June, 2001. It focuses on issues related to writing pedagogy, research, and theory.

Writing on the Edge http://woe.ucdavis.edu

Writing on the Edge , an interdisciplinary journal focusing on writing and the teaching of writing, is aimed primarily at college-level composition teachers and others interested in writing and writing instruction. It is published at the University of California at Davis and appears two times a year-in spring and fall.

Written Communication http://wcx.sagepub.com/

Written Communication is an international multidisciplinary journal that publishes theory and research in writing from fields including anthropology, English, history, journalism, linguistics, psychology, and rhetoric.

Xchanges   http://www.xchanges.org/

Xchanges  is an interdisciplinary Technical Communication, Writing/Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum journal, which publishes two issues annually from its home in the English Department at the University of New Mexico.  The fall issue each year features undergraduate research.  The spring issue features graduate-student research.  In each undergraduate issue, the journal publishes theses and research projects of upper-level undergraduate students.  The graduate-student issues features MA- and Ph.D.-level original research from emerging professionals in the journal's focal fields.  Xchanges  receives submissions from students from a wide array of institutions across the country and abroad.  Its faculty review board, comprised of TC, Comp/Rhet, and WAC faculty from throughout the U.S., reviews these submissions on a blind basis. 

Young Scholars in Writing https://youngscholarsinwriting.org/

Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric , A Peer-Reviewed Journal for Undergraduates, "is dedicated to publishing research articles written by undergraduates in a wide variety of disciplines associated with rhetoric and writing. It is guided by these central beliefs: (1) that research can and should be a crucial component of rhetorical education and (2) that undergraduates engaged in research about writing and rhetoric should have opportunities to share their work with a broader audience of students, scholars, and teachers through national publication."

Assessing Writing

Subject Area and Category

• Linguistics and Language

Elsevier Ltd

Publication type

1994-2000, 2002-2023

Information

How to publish in this journal

[email protected]

The set of journals have been ranked according to their SJR and divided into four equal groups, four quartiles. Q1 (green) comprises the quarter of the journals with the highest values, Q2 (yellow) the second highest values, Q3 (orange) the third highest values and Q4 (red) the lowest values.

The SJR is a size-independent prestige indicator that ranks journals by their 'average prestige per article'. It is based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'. SJR is a measure of scientific influence of journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from It measures the scientific influence of the average article in a journal, it expresses how central to the global scientific discussion an average article of the journal is.

Evolution of the number of published documents. All types of documents are considered, including citable and non citable documents.

This indicator counts the number of citations received by documents from a journal and divides them by the total number of documents published in that journal. The chart shows the evolution of the average number of times documents published in a journal in the past two, three and four years have been cited in the current year. The two years line is equivalent to journal impact factor ™ (Thomson Reuters) metric.

Evolution of the total number of citations and journal's self-citations received by a journal's published documents during the three previous years. Journal Self-citation is defined as the number of citation from a journal citing article to articles published by the same journal.

Evolution of the number of total citation per document and external citation per document (i.e. journal self-citations removed) received by a journal's published documents during the three previous years. External citations are calculated by subtracting the number of self-citations from the total number of citations received by the journal’s documents.

International Collaboration accounts for the articles that have been produced by researchers from several countries. The chart shows the ratio of a journal's documents signed by researchers from more than one country; that is including more than one country address.

Not every article in a journal is considered primary research and therefore "citable", this chart shows the ratio of a journal's articles including substantial research (research articles, conference papers and reviews) in three year windows vs. those documents other than research articles, reviews and conference papers.

Ratio of a journal's items, grouped in three years windows, that have been cited at least once vs. those not cited during the following year.

Evolution of the percentage of female authors.

Evolution of the number of documents cited by public policy documents according to Overton database.

Evoution of the number of documents related to Sustainable Development Goals defined by United Nations. Available from 2018 onwards.

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17.2: How can student journals be used for assessment?

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• Page ID 87688

• Jennfer Kidd, Jamie Kaufman, Peter Baker, Patrick O'Shea, Dwight Allen, & Old Dominion U students
• Old Dominion University

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by Amy B. Williams

Learning Objectives

• Be able to comprehend the important role that journals have in the classroom.
• Understand how journals can be used as an assessment method.
• Comprehend examples of using journals for language, math and science.

Introduction

Who ever said assessment wasn't fun? That is old news as journals are invading the classrooms! Journals have become a wonderful non-traditional assessment tool that falls under the category of personal communication. Teachers are understanding the role that journals have in the classroom and the benefits they provide for students. Journals aren't just for writing your deepest and darkest secrets while being kept hidden under your mattress! Throughout this article you will understand that the purpose of a journal is to allow students to have a voice. A voice that reflects their understanding and knowledge on a subject instead of just reiterating another person's ideas that they have memorized word-for-word. It is an informal style of writing that results in a student thinking for themselves.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Journals!

All the interest in journals is due to the fact that this type of personal communication encourages students to look at subjects and facts that they may have been intimidated by so the student feels more adventurous and willing to explore their ideas in writing (White, 2008). Journals aren't just for writing either; they can also involve drawing, painting and role-playing (Miami Museum of Science, 2008). If journaling is done correctly it can provide the following information:

• "Help students pinpoint what they know and don't know.
• Connect previous knowledge with what the student is currently studying.
• Summarize what the student understands and their knowledge on a topic.
• Help students understand important questions to ask.
• Help student keep his or her thoughts more organized.
• Support an interdisciplinay approach to education.
• Help student see in a more visual approach to learning.
• Allow student to take a tentative idea and make it more permanent" (Burchfield, 2005).

Students with a journal generally have clearer thoughts and an increased ability to explain a concept while the teacher can truly grasp the type of learner that student really is.

Using Journals In Math

This is a fantastic website for teachers to use journals in Math class. You can even click on a PDF of a Math Journal! This is a must see!

(Geocities.com, 2008)

Journal: A Teacher's Best Friend

The timing of a journal assignment includes different options with before, during, or after a lesson. There are two general types of journals in a classroom: 1. A journal that students are given very little direction on and the student writes down their thoughts, feelings and ideas, 2. A journal where the student is given a prompt or a specific topic to write on that has boundaries and guidelines needed for accuracy (Miami Museum of Science, 2008). Some teachers assign journal writing without grades. If this is the case, then the teacher will be more apt to correct grammar and spelling and make comments and appropriate praise. Journals also can be used for more class discussion and participation. If a student writes their ideas and understandings down on paper, then greater class discussion results. According to Hillocks, if a teacher uses journals in the classroom it allows that teacher to not only look through a window into how the student is thinking and learning, but how they learn. In other words, a journal shows if a student is struggling with a subject, their strengths and weaknesses, and if there are any misconceptions involved in learning.

According to Burchfied, Journals also answer specific questions for a teacher:

• Can the student organize information?
• Can the student explain a specific concept?
• Does the student use communication skills correctly to communicate an idea?
• Is the student confident in his or her abilities?
• What is the student feeling?
• Is the student's response coherent and well-structured (Burchfield, et al, 200

To give credit to journals for an assessment method is an understatement. It is obvious that journals provide a deeper depth and understanding into a student, which can only benefit teachers. Journals can be as simple as loose leaf papers in a folder, a spiral notebook labeled Journal, or store bought journals.

To Grade Or Not To Grade...

Grades are not necessary in journaling, but it is suggested to follow a specific rubric if assigning a grade. If grades are not given on a specific assignment, here are some great ideas on assessing a student's journal (Burchfield, et al., 2005):

• Because some of the writing is informal it is best to focus on content rather than mechanics.
• Be positive, encouraging and accepting of the student's writing.
• Single out one or two things to comment on and don't undertake the entire journal.
• Be specific when you comment on a specific problem.
• When appropriate, have students edit one another's journal.
• Ask students to read aloud, when appropriate, so the classroom becomes more conducive to sharing and confidence levels increase.
• After students have completed three journal entries, ask them to choose their best entry, revise it and have other students begin peer
• Allow for more revisions after peer editing and grading then post it on a classroom blog or website.

Again, grading isn't always a definite with journals and should be left up to the discretion of the teacher.

Examples of Journal Assignments: Don't Enter The Classroom Without Them!

Different Types of Journals

Daily Journals

• My most embarrassing moment...
• What I would like to change about school...
• My best friend is...
• The best thing that ever happened to me...
• The saddest thing that ever happened to me...
• What I want to be when I grow up...
• If I could change the world I would...

Specific Subject Prompts

• Does math scare you?
• Design two mathematical bumper stickers--one funny and one serious.
• If I were better at math, I would...
• If math could be a color (shape or sound) it would be...because...
• My best kept secret about math is...
• What kind of math figure are you? (Circle, square, triangle, parallelogram, etc.) Why?
• Record in journal your personal thoughts and feelings after reading "The Diary of Anne Frank." (or any book the student has read)
• What does Anne's diary tell us about her? (or any main character of a book)
• If you could talk to Anne, what would you ask her? (or any author)
• Give a different ending to the book you just finished.
• What if you were the main character?
• Explain how you feel the character was like in the book.
• Draw a picture of a scene from the book and write a sentence underneath.
• Across the top of your journal write WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY and WHEN...answer all these questions.
• Pick a President and write a letter to them about what you wish would be different and why?
• If you could have dinner with any past or present famous person who would it be and why?
• Student writes a paragraph using three vocabulary words written on the board.
• Write four Jeopardy style questions based on the lesson you were just taught.

(Teachervision.com, 2007)

• Have students record any science experiment results over a period of time.
• Record the amount of snowfall over a 2 week period, along with the temperature outside at time of snowfall and the amount of snow.
• Record in journal the stages of a classroom bean seedling during growth stages.
• Record which cup of water (1 hot, 1 cold and 1 room temp)freezes first and how long it took.

Final Thoughts

Journals are like a telescope into a student's mind. This type of personal communication allows students to express what they are feeling about specific topics. It is taking learning beyond the basics to see things as they really are and not just skimming the surface. Teachers are in the classroom for a reason, which is to impact the student academically, socially and emotionally. A journal is simply a collection of a student's feelings, ideas and thoughts put down in black and white. Incorporating journals into the classroom takes commitment and organization, but the payoff is an exciting and motivating way for students to learn.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. Journals are an assessment method that fall under the category:

a. Selected response

b. Extended written response

c. Performance assessment

d. Personal communication

2. If a journal is used correctly in the classroom, it can:

a. Connect the student's previous knowledge to what they are currently learning.

b. Tell a teacher the student deserves an A or F.

c. Inform the teacher if the student needs a different seating arrangement.

d. Allow the student to ignore the teacher's lesson.

3. The benefit of a journal for a teacher is:

a. One less thing to grade in an overwhelming job.

b. Tells the teacher if the student can explain a specific topic.

c. It helps the classroom seem less cluttered.

d. Allows the teacher to learn more about the student except for how he or she is feeling.

4. Stella has just completed an informal journal assignment for language in Mrs. Williams's classroom. Mrs. Williams is now ready to assess Stella's journal. What is the best method to consider?

a. It is best to focus on Stella's content rather than the mechanics of her journal.

b. Because it is an informal journal assignment, Stella should receive a specific grade.

c. Not even grade Stella's journal because it would focus on her character and not her capability.

d. Never asses a journal because it is to be used as a "filler" assignment when there is free time.

5. Mrs. Williams has just assigned a journal assignment after all the students read "The Diary of Anne Frank." She wants to compare and assess what the students predicted the diary meant to Anne Frank before they read the book and what they feel it meant to her after they finished the book. Why would Mrs. Williams be assessing this?

a. She can't think of another prompt for a journal topic.

b. The students seem like they are losing interest and this is a great way to motivate them.

c. She wants to assess if the students have fully grasped the concept of the diary and how it become a source of support for Anne Frank.

d. She knows Anne Frank is covered on the VA SOL and she feels this would be a good way to teach the students.

Burchfield, Kimberly, Jorgensen, Patricia, R., McDowell, Kimberly, G., and Rahn, Jim. (n.d). Writing In The Mathematics Curriculum. Retrieved on July 10, 2008 from www.woodrow.org/teachers/math/institutes/1993/37burc.html

Forms of Alternative Assessment. (2008). Miami Museum of Science-Alternative Assessment Definitions. Retrieved on July 8, 2008, from www.miamisci.org/ph/lpdefine.html

Geocities.com (2008) Writing In Mathematics-Math Students Know All The Angles. Retrieved July 7, 2008, from www.geocities.com/kaferico/writemat.htm?200812

Hillocks, George, The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessment Control Learning. 2002. London: Teachers College Press.

Teachervision.com (2007). Journaling Tips, Strengths, Strategies, & Topics. Retrieved July 5, 2008, from Http://www.teachervision.fen.com/writing/teaching-methods/6382.html