Author: Steve Krause

There was a good piece on NPR Saturday Edition about some of the problems of the SAT writing test. Basically, besides the other links at this site, they did an interview with Les Perelman, who is the director of writing at MIT. You can listen to the various stories from the web site, though there are a couple of things worth noting:

• Perelman studied the word count of the sample essays used by the SAT folk for scoring and the score they were supposed to receive and figured out that there was a direct correlation between the word count of the essay and the score. As the interviewer said, you could weigh the essays and get the same kind of score as you would from a reader.
• Perelman is on the WPA-L mailing list, and he has provided a few more tidbits about the whole interview process. Among other things, he has said that they talked to him for about an hour to get the 3 or 4 minutes of airtime, and that all of his efforts at bringing up the idea of portfolio grading were cut out of the show.

Update to this and the previous post:

Well, well, well: now that USA Today is weighing in on all this, maybe there will be a bit more attention to the problems of the SAT writing test. Maybe….

John asked a while ago for “all the teachers who read this blog to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.” I’ve been meaning to post about this for about a week now, but I’ve been distracted by a variety of different things. And besides, it’s a toughie. How do I name just five things? How do I come up with five issues or concerns?

Well, here’s a start:
1) How does the course in question fit into the “big picture” of the program? For example, if the course is first year composition, there are certain “introduction to academic life” sorts of skills and lessons that ought to be in that course. Certainly there are different issues and concerns in fy com than there is in a 300-level writing class or a grad course.

2) What do other people do who teach the course, and what do they expect out of the course? With a course like fy comp, this might come in the form of programmatic guidelines, like these outcomes for the first year writing program at EMU. But I also think it’s useful to talk with colleagues who have taught the course before. Maybe that’s common sense, but I’ve seen a few too many examples where instructors take on new courses and just didn’t do this.

3) Where do I want students to be at the end of the term? When I’m writing up a syllabus, especially for a new course, I usually start at the end of the term and work back toward the beginning. Part of it is simple logistics, but the other part of it is to try and figure out what sorts of things I need to do in the rest of the class to get students to that point.
4) What’s the basic “point” or “argument” I want to make in the class? Maybe this is the sort of thing that you can only do after teaching a class a couple if times, but I like classes to have a point, at least in my own mind. I’m not thinking of anything too complicated, though. For example, I’d describe the point of my fy comp class as “research writing is a process, one best completed in small steps.” Nothing revolutionary, but keeping this point in mind helps me shape the class assignments and activities.
5) How is all going to fit and what will I have to cut? Every time I’ve tried to develop a new class, I always do too much. Knowing that in advance, I try to realize that I can’t do everything I want to do. So the trick then is figuring out what I can afford to get rid of and still be able to do the first four things.

I don’t know if that’s what John was looking for exactly, but….

Update (5/11):
When I checked the stats for this page just now (about 11:30 am), I was surprised to see the number of hits and all from people visiting Inside Higher Ed. What’s up with that, I wondered. And then I noticed that they linked to this post in a little sidebar called “Around the Web.” Go figure.

Anyway, to be fair, it’s important to note that I posted this originally to respond to the call that John Lovas had to the question(s) that he asked on his excellent blog. Also, I know that at least Mike @ Vitia has posted five things to think about, too.

This isn’t in really of celebration of Cinco de Mayo, but it turns out that 5-5-05 is the day when I’ll post a bunch of links, mostly from the May 3 NCTE’s Inbox:

• NCTE comes out against the SAT writing test. Shocking, huh? I agree with the basic sentiment of this press release (and I’d probably agree with the accompanying report), but I do have two reservations. First, testing writing was never meant to be teaching writing. In fact, as one of the other links here suggests, there’s an argument that more testing in writing leads to more teaching of writing. Second, this is a statement that is perhaps a day late and a dollar short. I’m not completely in agreement with Jeff’s critique of this, but it seems to me that the writing administrators at various places ought to have been a bit more forceful about all this earlier.
• On the other hand, maybe the SAT writing test will lead to more writing instruction in high school. That’s the gist of this article. I guess time will tell, right?
• Say, just what is “good writing instruction,” anyway? Well, according to NCTE, this is it in the nutshell. I hadn’t seen this document before; it seems to me that it might be kind of interesting to read closely in a teaching of writing class– perhaps my computers and writing class. I mostly agree with it, but it is interestingly problematic as well. The first paragraph starts out promising enough:

Just as the nature of and expectation for literacy has changed in the past century and a half, so has the nature of writing. Much of that change has been due to technological developments, from pen and paper, to typewriter, to word processor, to networked computer, to design software capable of composing words, images, and sounds. These developments not only expanded the types of texts that writers produce, they also expanded immediate access to a wider variety of readers. With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.

Okay, that’s right up my alley. But then, in a list of 11 principles about what this paragraph means, direct attention to writing technologies (“Composing occurs in different modalities and technologies”) finishes in tenth place. I don’t know if the intent is to rank these items, but it is kind of how it reads.

• Leave it to someone outside of comp/rhet to offer some “common sense” about using machines to grade writing. See this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “Teachers look to computers to critique student essays.” The article is mostly about U of Missouri Sociologist Ed Brent and some software he uses to critique student writing. A lot of the article rehashes the same old problems of machine grading, but I thought a quote from Brent sort of summed up my (perhaps naive) take on the whole thing: “I don’t think we want to replace humans,” Brent said. “But we want to do the fun stuff, the challenging stuff. And the computer can do the tedious but necessary stuff.”

It’s National Teacher Day. Go figure.