Dani Day

Dr. Harrington

English 5365

3 March 1999

back to contemporary issues in writing assessmentpage

The assessment of student writing is not a process for which hard and fast rules have been identified. It is the site of origin and the ultimate destination for a variety of academic contests, motivated in some cases by genuine desire to improve the process, in others by political expediency, and in still others by some combination of the two. In years past, the majority of college students were believed to be single, native English speakers under the age of twenty-five. They were expected to attend college full time and were not expected to hold down a job or have child care responsibilities. In the interest of scientific inquiry, education studies, including those related to writing assessment, often considered this relatively homogenous, traditional student body to be a constant. More recently, educators have had to recognize and adjust for the growing populations of non-traditional students whose disparate natures, values and backgrounds call for disparate yet still valid and reliable assessment. To what extent writing assessment strategies should reflect information gleaned about specific populations of students has not yet been determined. However, it is generally accepted that assessment should not ignore these disparities. To this end, students for whom English is a second language, single mothers with small children and full time employees who attend night classes have received the attention of studies designed to determine their educational needs and difficulties. Some particular populations have received more attention than others. One group of students, prison inmates earning college degrees while incarcerated, are rarely considered as subjects for pedagogical inquiry. The impact, usefulness and appropriate design of writing assessment programs for imprisoned students is not a popular academic topic. Nevertheless, these students participate in classes where their success or failure is determined by the results of assessment and evaluation of their writing. Although a bibliography of works treating writing assessment of incarcerated students would be a convenient place to begin the study of assessing prison inmates’ writing, no such body of work exists. Therefore, the interested scholar must begin with a bibliography of related works. The following is a collection of literature relating to the philosophy of incarceration, evaluation and assessment of writing, prison education programs, and the education of marginalized students. Although wide ranging, this collection of books, journal articles and reports can be used to develop a basic understanding of the role education is expected to play within correctional facilities, the experience of marginalized students and some writing assessment methods currently being used in prison composition classes. A comprehensive and meaningful plan for assessing inmate writing will require both more data collection and more investigation than the subject has yet generated.

Angle, T. "The Development of Education Programs in American Adult Prisons and Juvenile Reformatories During the Nineteenth Century."Journal of Correctional Education 33 (1982): 35-39.

During the 19^th century, correctional education programs were primarily administered by priests and pastors whose principal goal was the saving of prisoners’ souls. Some of these programs directly addressed issues of morality and sin, functioning as an extension of the pulpit. Other programs attempted to provide education, usually in the way of literacy training, for the inmates. These literacy ventures were often set up like the Methodist Sunday schools, where academic education was the by product of reading and writing about morally uplifting subjects. Reform rather than rehabilitation was the goal. In order to work successfully within the culture of penal institutions, it is important to recognize that the heritage of education as a moral reform tool still plays a major part in the expectations of correctional education. As a result of this persistent perception, officers and administrators are often at odds with educators regarding the function and the process of education inside prison walls.

Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky. Ways of Reading. 3^rd ed. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Ways of Reading is an anthology of excerpts and essays related to marginalization, power, education and evaluation. Particularly useful in approaching the assessment of inmate writing are Michel Foucault’s "The Body of the Condemned," Paulo Freire’s "The Banking Concept of Education," Mary Louise Pratt’s "Arts of the Contact Zone," Klaus Theweleit’s "Male Bodies and the White Terror," and Richard Rodriguez’s "The Achievement of Desire." These essays and others in the book highlight some of the issues inherent to education in an environment defined by power and powerlessness. They offer some explanation for the conditions and attitudes of both inmates and officers. While none of the essays focus on writing assessment, specifically, several present models for developing assessment procedures which can be accepted as legitimate by both student and teacher.

Coyle, William J. Libraries In Prisons. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1987.

William Coyle discusses the history of prison libraries and their present function. He describes some of the difficulties prison librarians have as they try to negotiate the differences between their training as service oriented facilitators and research assistants, and their job as gatekeepers of directed socialization. He describes the limits of prison facility libraries as they are defined by legislative mandates and the practical requirements of the incarceration institution. Coyle’s description of the options available for inmate research highlights one of the difficulties educators have when trying to apply free world assessment procedures to students educated in correctional facilities. Despite findings that support the efficacy of enhancing critical thinking skills and creative practice as a practical method for reducing recidivism, prison libraries are not usually equipped to support research. Instead, they are limited to legally mandated law resources and material that can be viewed as overtly socially rehabilitative. As a result, prison college graduates evaluated on the same scale as free world graduates will inevitably appear to be less skilled with regard to data acquisition and manipulation.

Fiderer, Adele. 35 Rubrics & Checklists to Assess Reading and Writing :Time-Saving Reproducible Forms for Meaningful Literacy Assessment. New York: Scholastic Books, 1998.

The rubrics and checklists provided by Adele Fiderer focus on surface level issues related to Standard English conventions. They are useful in providing teacher and student with a yardstick against which to judge competency in sentence level grammar and the more easily quantifiable elements of style, such as thesis statements, supporting details and comprehensive conclusions. Correctional facility composition instructors often use Fiderer’s guides to evaluate prison inmate writing. When used in courses designed to prepare students for the writing portions of TAAS or TASP tests, they seem to be effective and reliable. However, Fiderer’s assessment criteria do not include methods for measuring critical analysis, nor are they designed to evaluate adult students with varied cultural backgrounds. As a result, they are perceived negatively by the students and use of them is resented, particularly in college level courses.

Garay, Maray Sue and Stephen A. Bernhardt. Expanding Literacies: English Teaching and the New Work Place. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.

The articles and essays in this book describe ways in which the changing work place needs to be reflected in the classroom. Businesses are asking for educated employees who can contribute to a collaborative working/learning environment and have the ability to evaluate themselves. Several of the articles directly address writing assessment and its relationship to the development of workplace skills. This kind of information should be seriously considered by instructors in correctional education programs which claim to prepare students for free world enployment.

Jones, Ray. "A Coincidence of Interests: Prison Higher Education in Massachusetts." Journal of Prisoners on Prisons 41 (1992): 17-21.

Ray Jones notes that higher education programs were initiated within the Massachusetts prison system at about the same time that rehabilitation programs were being cut. He believes that this was a coincidence, not an intentional change on the part of prison administrators and funding sources. He suggests that since there was funding available for education programming, and since institutions of higher learning are always looking for funding, such institutions stepped in to fill the void left by rehabilitation projects. As support for this contention, he points out that the schools which involved themselves in correctional education at the outset were schools which did not have the advantage of strong reputations and the accompanying grant and alumni sources for financial support. Jones further suggests that the emphasis on job market skills and other rehabilitative concepts, tied in current literature to education and recidivism relationship studies, is the residual impact of the rehabilitation programming gap now filled by higher education.

Kozol, Jonathan. Death At An Early Age. New York:Penguin Books, 1985.

Jonathan Kozol looks, primarily, at the elementary education of students who are socially and economically disadvantaged. The students described are being taught, for the most part, by well intentioned instructors who are completely unable to identify with the children’s experience of life. As a result, the teachers receive little job satisfaction and the students are unable to absorb much of the academic information presented. Several chapters in Kozol’s book describe situations in which traditional testing and evaluation procedures are used by instructors who have presented traditional material in traditional formats. In one instance, the evaluation of a writing assignment was based on the "quality" of the adjectives used to describe various prescribed environments. Since most of the students lived in tenement housing, without yards, gardens or playgrounds, they were unable to meet the demands of an assignment which required them to describe a house and neighborhood park or playground. Particularly difficult to fulfill was the teacher’s criterion that the description be positive and uplifting, using only "happy" adjectives. Most of the students had not experienced happy environments or positive, uplifting lives. As a result of their inability to envision the environment they had been assigned to describe, the students experienced one more failure. As a result of her inability to envision the students’ world, the teacher also experienced another failed attempt to teach. Kozol’s book is a powerful argument in favor of contextual assessment.

Lindemann, Erika. "Making and Evaluating Writing Assignments." A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers 2^nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.191-223.

Erika Lindemann divides writing assessment into three categories, depending on the purpose of the assessment: administrative, instructional, evaluation and research. Although she recognizes a need to provide administrative data and quantifiable results for program assessment and comparative research, she does not perceive this kind of assessment to be as useful to students as qualitative comments. She emphasizes the instructional aspect of assessment as the most pertinent to the needs of writing teachers. Lindemann points out that most students, even if they know the meaning of evaluative comments like "awkward" or "fragment" do not understand how those comments relate to their own writing. She suggests that writing assessment in the classroom take the form of constructive criticism and positive reinforcement, presented as written statements which model the conventions the course is attempting to teach.

McCormick, Joseph E. "Beating The System." Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. 51 (1994): 21-25.

A prisoner describes education as the only way to "beat the system." He focuses on the attainment of literacy and the necessity for learning how to negotiate evaluation systems. In his opinion, the social system from which he has sprung is designed to foster failure. In that sense, prison inmates have succeeded in negotiating the system, ending up where they were meant to be. In order to beat this system, inmates must achieve the highest possible level of education. By so doing, they will be better prepared to escape the downward spiral of dysfunction and failure in which so many inmates are trapped. He suggests that learning to negotiate the evaluation and assessment processes in the classroom, regardless of how unreasonable they might appear to be, is an excellent way to prepare for negotiating the assessment of the free world, which will inevitably appear unreasonable.

Milroy, James and Leslie Milroy. Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardization 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 1991.

Primarily a sociolinguistic text, Authority in Language highlights the issues inherent in teaching "good English" to students who recognize, if not identify themselves as communicatively competent. It presents easy to understand descriptions of and recent scholarship pertaining to linguistic repertoires, speech communities, prescription and standardization. On the basis of linguistic realism and cultural linguistic bias, the final chapter of the book offers critiques of language tests, including writing assessments. The book concludes that present assessment systems do not distinguish between those students who do not perform well as a result of developmental problems, literacy problems or normal but non-standard language ability. It calls for systematic analytic procedures for teaching non-standard speakers to use standard English and it insists that assessment and teaching should take into account the relationship between language performance and situational factors.

Newman, Anabel P., Warren Lewis and Caroline Beverstock. Prison Literacy: Implications for Program and Assessment Policy Technical Report TR93-1Bloomington, Indiana:Indiana University National Center on Adult Literacy, co-published with ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1993.

This is a comprehensive study of the value of education programs for prison inmates. It discusses the need for and the nature of available programming and it makes recommendations for future correctional education. This study places significant value on the role played by education in reducing recidivism, identifying particular course characteristics as more likely to achieve this goal. The authors identify language proficiency, both written and verbal, as a primary ingredient. Cognitive programs are favored over intuitive or quantitative knowledge acquisition plans. Teaching and/or reinforcing analytic and decision making skills as a method for providing inmates with practice in a process most have not negotiated well in the past is the basis for many of the recommendations in this report. The authors outline general suggestions for evaluation and assessment of incarcerated students’ academic abilities and progress. In most cases, these suggestions relate to identification and accommodation of the students’ knowledge base, both intellectual and cultural. The study suggests that courses for inmates with limited English proficiency recognize cultural differences and provide opportunities for validating those differences within the classroom, while at the same time providing the inmates with the necessary tools for operating outside their cultural base.

Reeves, Dave. "Two Writers in Residence in local prisons discuss their work." Raw Edge Magazine 5 (1997):21-25.

Kevin McCann and Nigel Moffit, professional authors, have spent two years as Writer in Residence at two prisons in Great Britain. Both authors commented on the improvement of the inmates’ writing, both in quality and in quantity, when it became apparent to the inmates that the Writer in Residence program was a professional project, designed to offer experience, encouragement and assistance to incarcerated writers. McCann cites a particular turning point. At first he had provided traditional evaluation, or criticism. When he began couching his suggestions for improvement as advice, ignoring spelling and punctuation issues, the students opened up and began to produce better work. Rather than resenting comments about their adherence to the conventions of Standard English, they began to ask for "advice" about mechanical issues. Moffit focused his program on writing for performance, operating the class as a script writing team. The inmates were diligent, critical and demanding regarding one another’s performance standards.

Williford, Miriam, ed. Higher Education in Prison:A Contradiction in Terms? Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1996.

The contributors to Higher Education in Prison : A Contradiction in Terms? appear to see college courses taught in correctional facilities as primarily useful in providing inmates with the skills and credentials required to participate in free world society. According to these authors, evaluation of inmate success in individual courses as well as in the overall program should focus on the students’ personal improvement and achievement of individual goals. While this is a laudable aim, it does not take into consideration the expectations engendered by a college degree. Both the graduating students and their prospective employers expect levels of competency commensurate with free world degreed applicants. Given the inevitable handicap a prison record confers, should correctional education programs design assessment processes to require a higher level of achievement when measured against similar students from free world institutions? According to this book, the answer is no.