Assessment in Technical and Professional Communication

This collection of essays focuses on both how and why assessment serves as a key element in the teaching and practice of technical and professional communication. The collection is organized to form a dual approach: on the one hand, it offers a landscape view of the activities involved in assessment—examining how it works at institutional, program, and classroom levels; on the other, it surveys the implications of using assessment for formulating, maintaining, and extending the teaching and practice of technical communication. The book offers teachers, students, scholars, and practitioners alike evidence of the increasingly valuable role of assessment in the field, as it supports and enriches our thinking and practice.No other volume has addressed the demands of and the expectations for assessment in technical communication. Consequently, the book has two key goals. The first is to be as inclusive as is feasible for its size, demonstrating the global operation of assessment in the field. For this reason, descriptions of assessment practice lead to examinations of some key feature of the landscape captured by the term "technical communication." The second goal is to retain the public and cooperative approach that has characterized technical communication from the beginning. To achieve this, the book represents a "conversation," with contributors chosen from among practicing, highly active technical communication teachers and scholars; and the chapters set up pairs of opening statement and following response. The overriding purpose of the volume, therefore, is to invite the whole community into the conversation about assessment in technical communication.

Margaret Hundleby teaches in the Engineering Communication Program at the University of Toronto, after working in programs in the United States and in other parts of Canada. She has also been an industry consultant in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She approaches technical communication work through rhetoric and the social organization of knowledge, centering research on epistemic aspects of technical communication and the relations between written text and visuals. She has been part of several major assessment undertakings at the University of Guelph (Ontario), Michigan Tech, and Auburn University, and served as founding liaison for the first CPTSC/ATTW assessment initiative. She has also been a member of the Engineering Assessment Consortium, meeting at Rice University.Jo Allen is the Senior Vice President and Provost at Widener University in Chester, PA, where she oversees eight schools and colleges, student affairs, the libraries, academic support services, and special programming. Before her work at Widener, she was a faculty member and administrator at North Carolina State University, where she helped promote student learning outcomes assessment as part of her role as Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs. Earlier in her career, she served as a faculty member and administrator at East Carolina University, where she co-directed programs in technical and professional communication and supported the assessment work from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.