Race and Writing Assessment

In this collection of essays, US contributors in English and composition raise questions about race, class, and assessment in classrooms, writing programs, and large-scale assessments of writing such as standardized tests. In the first part of the book, they look at how race is often avoided in the practices of composition studies. In Section 2, the drawbacks of technologies for assessment, such as the machine scoring program Criterion, are explored. Section 3 explores students' and teachers' attitudes toward racial and linguistic variation, and section 4 looks at issues related to assessing writing for placement in a first-year composition course. Section 5 considers writing assessment in college admissions and international testing. Inoue teaches rhetoric and composition at California State University-Fresno. Poe teaches English at Pennsylvania State University. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Asao B. Inoue received his PhD from Washington State University. He is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at California State University, Fresno, the Special Assistant to the Provost on Writing across the Curriculum, and the First Year Writing Program Assessment Coordinator. Dr. Inoue has published articles on validity theory, writing assessment, and directed self-placement in The Journal of Writing Assessment, Assessing Writing, and Composition Forum as well as in numerous collections.
Mya Poe received her PhD from University of Massachusetts. She is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University. Prior to coming to Penn State, she was Director of Technical Communication at MIT. She is the co-author of Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering: Case Studies from MIT (with Neal Lerner and Jennifer Craig, 2010). Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Along with Tom Deans, she is editor of the Oxford University Press Short Guides to Writing in the Disciplines series.