Cope et al ?Technology-Mediated Writing Assessments: Principles ...

This is where we?ll talk about?Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Sarah McCarthey, Colleen Vojak, Sonia Kline, ?Technology-Mediated Writing Assessments: Principles and Processes.??Link?|?PDF?Sorry it took me later than I would have preferred to get this up and running? the results of too busy of a weekend and a completely unnecessary snow day for my son. But I digress.

We?re reading two articles this week that are basically from the same group of researchers at the University of Illinois that were both in the same issue of?Computers and Composition?in 2011. So I think there?s an intentionality of these two essays commenting on each other.

Let me start by just sharing a generality about the idea of ?technology-mediated? assessment and how that tends to play out in the larger composition and rhetoric community. ?Basically, when someone in a conference presentation or during a discussion on an electronic mailing list (the WPA-L immediately comes to mind) raises the idea that grading with computers might??might and in theory? be useful as part of the assessment process, most comp/rhet teachers come after that someone with pitchforks and torches. For many (most?) scholars in the field, it is nearly a non-starter in terms of conversation.

So I very much appreciate what Cope et al are doing here in bringing up the conversation. ?They?re arguing that if we?re going to value writing over things like multiple choice tests as a way to assess learning (and they clearly mean things beyond fycomp), then it just makes sense to take advantage of emerging technologies. Some of the things they suggest are pretty much here already; beides ?natural language analytics? (think of the grammar and spell-checker functions), corpus comparison is used quite a bit to assess predetermined prompts and there?s good evidence that it works quite well. That is, this is a good tool for evaluating a bunch of essays that all respond to the same question (?What was the significance of the Declaration of Independence in the Revolutionary War??) but not so good at the kinds of writing that happens a lot in first year writing (?Write about an event that was important for you in developing your sense of literacy.?)

Some of the ?network-mediated? feedback tools that they mention are also emerging. I know the folks who have developed this software, but check out as an example Eli, which isn?t so much a machine doing the grading as it is a machine?facilitating peer review.

If you don?t get all of the technologies they talk about, that?s okay too. I didn?t either. And actually, I think that?s part of the problem here and part of the slippery nature of agency. I think a lot of people in the comp/rhet world simply do not believe that it would be possible for a computer program to do some of the work they do as readers and evaluators because they (we and I include ?me? in that) don?t understand how it could work. To me, that?s the same agency/thinking machine question that we were pondering last week with blogbjects and with computer-driven cars and the like.

Source: http://engl516.stevendkrause.com/2013/02/11/cope-et-al-technology-mediated-writing-assessments-principles-and-processes/

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