Last month, three of the major professional organizations in my field, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP), released a landmark document that was years in the making: the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.
The Framework is getting a great deal of attention right now among teachers of composition and rhetoric because it combines a set of demonstrable, cognitive skills and outcomes in five areas we have traditionally used as metrics for student performance (rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, writing processes, knowledge of conventions, and abilities to compose in multiple environments) with less measurable, affective dispositions the framers call “habits of mind”:
o Curiosity – the desire to know more about the world.
o Openness – the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world.
o Engagement – a sense of investment and involvement in learning.
o Creativity – the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas.
o Persistence – the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects.
o Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.
o Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.
o Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.
The complete version of the Framework does an admirable job beginning the conversation about how these habits might be measured and assessed (see pp. 4-5). Here’s one example of how the third habit, engagement (a sense of investment and involvement in learning), is fleshed out:
Engagement is fostered when writers are encouraged to
Engagement is fostered when writers are encouraged to
• make connections between their own ideas and those of others;
• find meanings new to them or build on existing meanings as a result of new connections; and
• act upon the new knowledge that they have discovered.
Can we come up with ways to measure an individual student’s level of “engagement” (or persistence, or flexibility, or metacognition, or any of the other habits of mind) through a comprehensive examination of that student’s body of work over the course of a semester? Or, perhaps more important to our shared goal of instilling transferable, postsecondary skills and dispositions in our students, can we come up with ways to give our students the capacity to measure their own progress in these areas and to chronicle that progress with artifacts from their own body of work?
This conversation will need to be continued by all of us in more detail. It is a conversation worth having, both inside the discipline of composition and rhetoric and across all academic disciplines. I encourage all of us to think about how we could each create individual, course-based, and programmatic assessments that honor the education of the whole student, if for no other reason than to start our students on the road to recovery from the unconscionably reductive assessments they have come to expect from their K-12 instruction during the era of SOLs.
--Miles McCrimmon
Professor of English
