scholarly journals The Writing Exam as Index of Policy, Curriculum, and Assessment: An Academic Literacies Perspective on High Stakes Testing in an American University

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Freeman Smith
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Writing Assessment ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Academic Literacy ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
American University ◽  
Composition Classrooms ◽  
Assessment Decisions

Academic literacy is a policy goal universities implement through curricular and assessment decisions that are generally discipline-based. Disciplinary genres are traditionally seen as relatively fixed entities, easily evaluated by practiced members of the field and able to be emulated and mastered by students with training. This study examines the interplay of policy, curriculum, and assessment as they concern academic literacy in higher education and explore how writing assessment is employed in the maintenance and verification of academic literacy. The research took place at a small university known primarily for its pharmacy school and preparation for careers in the sciences and health sciences. The university is unusual in that it requires that students pass a writing proficiency exam in order to graduate. This research employed ethnographic methods and textual analysis to discover the interaction between university writing policy and its real-world effects. Data was collected in the form of fieldnotes of my observations of the Writing Center and interactions on-campus; ethnographic interviews with faculty, administrators, and students; course syllabi and other site documents; and exam bluebooks.This study looks at the use of the five-paragraph theme as an assessment tool, an academic genre rarely seen outside of composition classrooms and essay exams. It also evaluates the social and institutional function of a high-stakes testing policy, and how the policy serves to balance curricular ideologies with other constraints. It shows how universities, increasingly working under a business model, make curricular and assessment decisions in the interest of balancing hiring costs, academic ideology, and so on, in an iterative process. The results of this research have implications for evaluating writing policy in higher education institutions, and the use and structure of writing assessment in other arenas as well.

High stakes testing in higher education and employment: Appraising the evidence for validity and fairness.

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Sackett ◽  
Matthew J. Borneman ◽  
Brian S. Connelly
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Education And Employment

Re-crafting an Academic Literacies approach to pedagogic communication in higher education

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Literacy ◽  
Reproductive Function ◽  
Literacy Skills ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Theoretical Synthesis ◽  
Institutional Dimension ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Critical Hope ◽  
Communicative Relationship

The communicative relationship between learners and teachers in higher education, particularly as manifested in assessment and feedback, is often problematic. I begin from an Academic Literacies approach that positions academic literacy as requiring learners to acquire a complex set of literacy skills and abilities within specific discursive and institutional contexts. Whilst acknowledging the institutional dimension of academic literacy, I argue that the Academic Literacies approach tends to underestimate its significance. This shortcoming can be addressed by considering student speaking and writing as powerfully constrained by what Bourdieu refers to as the authority of pedagogic institutions, which function in what Sennett calls the culture of the new capitalism. Synthesising Bourdieu and Sennett, I argue, opens up possibilities for creating a pedagogy for itself: a pedagogy conscious of its reproductive function but able to provide both learners and teachers with what Canaan terms critical hope. Through this theoretical synthesis I seek to re-craft the Academic Literacies approach to pedagogic communication so that our understanding of the problems experienced by learners in acquiring academic literacy can be enhanced.

Writing feedback as an exclusionary practice in higher education

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Chu-Lin Chang
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Academic Literacy ◽  
Written Feedback ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Academic Communities ◽  
Writing Feedback

This ethnographic research probes into feedback on academic writing received by Taiwanese students in Australian higher education institutions, and examines whether the feedback received helped students to participate in the written discourse of academic communities. Academic writing dominates the academic life of students in Australia and is the key measure of their academic performance. This can be problematic for international students who speak English as an additional language and who are expected to acquire academic literacies in English ‘by doing’. As a social practice, academic writing depends on participation in dialogue for students to be included in the community of academia. However, the findings show that few participants received any useful feedback. Some assignments were never returned; in other cases, the hand-written feedback was illegible, and often included only overly general comments that puzzled the participants. As a result, the learning process came to an end once the students handed in their assignments; feedback failed to promote further learning related to content, and particularly to academic writing. The article highlights the few instances where participants received helpful feedback that was accessible and constructive, and which can be considered best practice for the promotion of academic literacy.

scholarly journals “What kind of paper do you want from us?”: developing genre knowledge in one Kazakhstani university postgraduate school

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Montgomery ◽  
Jason Sparks ◽  
Bridget Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Academic Literacy ◽  
Knowledge Development ◽  
Student Experiences ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Literacy Practice ◽  
Genre Awareness ◽  
Science School ◽  
Genre Knowledge

Drawing on the Academic Literacies perspectives of Lea and Street and key genre theorists, this mixed-methods case study explored multilingual student experiences of academic literacy practices in one postgraduate social-science school in an English-medium university in Kazakhstan. Two questions guided the research: (1) To what extent and in what ways do students develop genre knowledge in their school EMI contexts?; (2) Which pedagogical approaches and strategies do students identify as beneficial in supporting genre knowledge development? The study found students developed genre awareness for research-related literacy practices, involving field-, tenor- and mode-related genre knowledge. The study also found student capacity to apply genre knowledge successfully across a range of text genres. Another finding was that challenge and success in genre knowledge development was a function of the extent of explicit feedback from instructors and peers and explicit assignment expectations. Each of our findings are consistent with the critique and recommendations of Lea and Street (1998; 2006) on the importance of a situated approach to developing student academic literacy practice that accounts for the larger institutional contexts and epistemological traditions in which those practices have meaning. These findings have important value for discussions and debates on student academic literacy learning and practice in higher education in Kazakhstan, across Central Asia and in other countries where policies for internationalization and research universities are rapidly transforming higher education literacy practice in the current era of globalization.

scholarly journals Tracing academic literacies across contemporary literacy sponsorscapes: Mobilities, ideologies, identities, and technologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon M Wargo ◽  
Peter I. De Costa
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literacy Development ◽  
Academic Literacy ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Writing Classroom ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Emerging Literacy ◽  
New Directions

Locating itself broadly within the 'sociolinguistics of mobility' (Blommaert, 2014) and taking heed of Stornaiuolo and Hall's (2014) call to 'trace resonance' in writing and literacies research, this article works to trace academic literacies across the emerging 'literacy sponsorscapes' (Wargo, 2016a) of contemporary culture. Despite its variance and recent resurgence (Lillis and Scott, 2007), academic literacies continues to be reduced to: (1) an instrumentalist and pragmatic pedagogy, and (2) the ability to navigate academic conventions and practices of higher education (Lea and Street, 1998), in particular the writing classroom (Castelló and Donahue, 2012). This centred focus, however, is limiting, and silences the more innocuous and less tangible sponsors of academic literacies: mobilities , ideologies, identities , and technologies . Set against the backdrop of globalization, and grounded in two case studies, this article considers how academic literacies are not an 'and' but an 'elsewhere', thereby emphasizing the importance of sociolinguistic space in academic literacy development. In it, we chart new directions for scholarship and underscore how ideologies shift with mobilities (Pennycook, 2008; Pennycook, 2012), are indexed by identities (De Costa and Norton, 2016; Hawkins, 2005), and extend through technologies (Lam, 2009; Rymes, 2012). By outlining a literacy sponsorscapes framework for studying academic literacies, this article highlights the purchasing power of seeing academic literacies not solely as a field or set of practices, but rather as a locating mechanism for studying a range of hybridized repertoires that are shaped and constituted by the physical and social spaces that contemporary youth inhabit.

High-stakes testing in employment, credentialing, and higher education: Prospects in a post-affirmative-action world.

2001 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 302-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Sackett ◽  
Neal Schmitt ◽  
Jill E. Ellingson ◽  
Melissa B. Kabin
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
High Stakes

The High Risks of High-Stakes Testing

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce B. Henderson
Keyword(s):  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
High Stakes
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