March 16, 2009

Experts Discuss Best Ways to Evaluate Improvement in Students' Writing

By Josh Keller

San Francisco

Writing instructors need to do more to prevent colleges from adopting tests that only narrowly measure students' writing abilities, several experts said last week at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

How to craft better writing assessments was a central theme at the convention, the nation's largest gathering of composition and rhetoric instructors. As undergraduate writing tests become more common, several panelists said, many of