Organic Writing Assessment
Title
Organic Writing Assessment
Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Estrem, Susanmarie Harrington, Maureen McBride, Eric Stalions, Scott Weeden

7x10, 174 pages

ISBN 978-0-87421-730-8
paper $24.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-731-5
e-book $15.00

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Organic Writing Assessment

Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action

Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Estrem, Susanmarie Harrington, Maureen McBride, Eric Stalions, Scott Weeden

Educators appropriately strive to create "assessment cultures" (Huot 2002) in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators establish the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on writing assessment practice is just beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches.

For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations that these writers invented for Broad's original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies.

Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation in an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows the range of DCM's flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

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Also by Bob Broad: What We Really Value
Also by Linda Adler-Kassner: The Activist WPA
Also by Susanmarie Harrington: The Outcomes Book