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As Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years ("Looking"). Yancey's history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined.
The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White's germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, "Foreword"; Camp and Levine) as ways to link assessment and teaching, but they have also been constructed as better off without any evaluative element at all (Hamilton; Sunstein).
Even in our consideration of how students assess themselves, we have focused primarily on a discourse that links one's progress in writing with one's grades or success in school. The ability of students to assess themselves has long been an important pedagogical (Beaven; Marting and others) and research (Beach; Beach and Eaton and others) concern in composition. In fact, the reflective writing often included in portfolios has also been seen as an important tool for student self-assessment (Armstrong; Mills-Court and Amiran; Yancey,...