When used in community college settings, directed-self placement may

increase student agency and engagement as learners and help them

identify as academic writers.

Opening a Conversation about Student Placement Options This conversation is an attempt to

interrogate the places where our understanding of college writing, student assessment, and community college purposes intersect

I hope to interrogate points of aggravation between intentions and practices in the field

Community Colleges and the Truman Commission, 1946

To establish and expand We have proclaimed our faith in education as a

means of equalizing the conditions of men. But there is grave danger that our present policy will make it an instrument for creating the very inequalities it was designed to prevent. If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at all at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions,but of deepening and solidifying them. (qtd. in Bounds, 2005)

Snap Shot of Community College Students 2003-2004 Over 50% of all first-time students in college enroll in community

colleges 30% of all new h. s. graduates in 2003 enrolled in community colleges

in the fall 35% of community college student are 30 years of age or older Students enroll for a variety of reasons

36% plan to transfer to a 4-year institution 43 % seeking a two-year degree 17% seeking a job certificate 42% obtaining job skills 15% seeking transfer to another kind of college

Students from low income backgrounds, non-white races, and women are over-represented in community colleges compared to their surrounding communities and to four-year colleges. (Cohen, 2008, and Quigley)

* taken from NCES data for 2003-2004 enrollment

Placement Strategies Vary Community colleges, which pay little

attention to the ACT and SAT, often have a variety of localized and subjective measures for student placement, including Accuplacer and the Nelson-Denny to help “place” students in the appropriate writing course.

Attempts to Standardize In recent decades great efforts have

been made to use standardized tests such as Accuplacer, Compass, and the Nelson-Denny, in combination with subjective measures, such as additional essays and GPA, to ensure fairness in testing procedures and placement decisions for students entering college with a lack of college-level skills in reading, writing, and math.

Some of the rationales for this move in community colleges has been to help regulate the norms for college writing

Current Student Assessment Need to get current numbers on

accuplacer, compass trends, etc.

1970 Recommendations for student success in the two-year composition classroom

composition courses should aim to meet individual rather than institutional or class needs

due to cultural biases of teachers, students should share in the assessment of writing samples intended for placement

the disadvantaged or under-prepared students should have an opportunity to learn through “regular practice” through a graduated step-based process of writing

students should not have the feeling that they are in a remedial course.

CCCC Position Statement on Assessment for Writing Placement “Experienced instructor-evaluators can most effectively

make a judgment regarding which course would best serve each student’s needs and assign each student to the appropriate course. If scoring systems are used, scores should derive from criteria that grow out of the work of the courses into which students are being placed.”

“Students should have the right to weigh in on their assessment. Self-placement without direction, sometimes touted as a student right, may become merely a right to fail, whereas directed self-placement, either alone or in combination with other methods, provides not only useful information but also involves and invests the student in making effective life decisions.”

While CCC encourages individual instructor placement, they suggest, “Placement processes should be continually assessed and revised in accord with course content and overall program goals. This is especially important when machine-scored assessments are used. Using methods that are employed uniformly, teachers of record should verify that students are appropriately placed.”

“A Modest Level of Literacy” Heather MacDonald, a Manhattan

Institute fellow who served on Giuliani’s task force to assess higher education and who supported reversing CUNY’s open-admissions policy, argues that placement tests “are measuring very, very basic skills in reading and writing. It is not placing undue expectations on someone to show a very modest level of literacy''.

Writing and Thought

Crews argues, “the developmental writing course is designed for the student who is not yet ready for higher-level thinking. As the students gain knowledge and begin to value knowledge, they move from the developmental writing course to college-level work” (8).

Complicating the definition of Literacy “the deviancy of illiterates tends to be

thought of as lack of a simple mechanical skill. Illiterates should learn writing as they learned to tie their shoe-laces or to drive a car. Such views of writing as simply a mechanical skill obligatory for all human beings distort our understanding of what is human if only because they block understanding of what natural human processes are before writing takes possession of consciousness” and by extension, blocks our understanding of writing itself. (Ong, 23)

Writing is Social From CCCC Position Statement on Assessment

“Writing is by definition social. Learning to write entails learning to accomplish a range of purposes for a range of audiences in a range of settings.”

As writing instructors it is one of our primary purposes is to help students write for specific rhetorical purposes and audiences.

It behooves us to continue to press against the belief that what we call standard writing is the product of good thinking if we want our students to adopt writing and revision practices into their daily writing lives (literacy source and citation).

Writing often leads to thinking Academic definitions of standard writing often delimit

culturally-modeled middle-class norms for discourse, rather than a student’s ability to critically think.

Sociocultural perspective of literacy Lankshear and Knobel explain that from

a new literacies perspective, that is “understanding literacies from a sociocultural perspective means that reading and writing can only be understood in the contexts of social, cultural, political, economic, historical practices to which they are integral, of which they are a part” (2007, p. 1)

Directed Self Placement Establishes first contact and an attitude

of collaboration Introduces students to the expectations

in their college education Invites students to consider their goals

and how to meet them through educational choice

Might help community colleges individualize educational plans to better meet student needs

DSP: An Attitude of Orientation

Royer and Roger Gilles explain in their article “Directed Self-Placement: An Attitude of Orientation,” that DSP sends students and faculty alike an important message— the goal of higher education is to afford opportunities for success in an optional higher education environment.

Right to Fail? Hadden (2000) is concerned that

“prepared students who may find themselves in classes in which the professor is moving at a slower rate or watering down the course material to help underprepared students pass the course.”

“Ultimately, access versus success places community colleges in a dilemma of choice and standards.”

Previous CCCC panels

Holmsten reported at CCCC that in her teacher research, basic writers were the best predictors of their own writing ability and will place themselves in remedial courses.

Connecticut Community College System’s experiences with the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Ignored placement recommendations, 68%

passed the college-level composition course 72% of their counterparts who enrolled in

college-level composition passed the college level course after taking the recommended basic skills course

(Sturtz)

Self-Placement at American River College: Math Felder, Kinney, and First (2007)

Math Level Self-Placement Compass

Computational Arithmetic

57.8% 54%

Pre-algebra 58.7% 58%

Elementary Algebra 57.5% 55.4%

Elementary Geometry

50% (low sample) 71.0%

Intermediate Algebra

58.3% 61%

American River College

The writing department chose not to implement Informed-self placement because they could not agree on the evaluation rubric for college writing

Although the math and writing are different disciplines and students learn them differently. ..

Access vs. Standards? Standards through Access? Although I take Hammend’s point that without

enforced, mandatory placement, students may enroll in courses they are likely to fail

However, can we argue that the difference is significant from those who do so already or who simply do not take required courses in English because they are required to take basic writing?

Involving students in the decision-making process treats them like the voluntary adult students that they are, and, by extension, may allow us to maintain the standards of our courses.

Assumptions about Community College Writers

Actual Community College Students*

Do Practices Reinforce Structural Inequalities? Irvin Peckham argues that the academy,

rather than providing opportunity to first-generation, low-income students, reinforces the barriers to social uplift because the norm for failure is set by the performance of these classes and modified by dominant, middle-class culture to maintain educational and economic power (in Virtanen 446).

Student Involvement If we want students to think critically, we

need to engage them in meaningful problem-based tasks that require critical thought

Collaborating in one’s own education is such a task.

Quote– how can we say we want students to think critically when we are unwilling to give them meaningful opportunities for critical thought

Point of Aggravation

When used in community college settings, directed-self placement may increase student agency and engagement as learners and help them identify as academic writers.

Validity of Testing

However, few college admissions officials have called into question the validity of literacy testing, itself, as a means for course placement. Several studies show these tests demonstrate marginal predictive validly, if any at all, for determining student success in writing classes or in extended coursework.

What do the Tests Measure While there seems a bulk of evidence

that students who perform poorly on such tests will have less success in their higher educational fields, often this reflects the degree to which these students have been able to socially assimilate into the academic environment rather than demonstrating a true correlation between literacy levels and learning (Virtanen).

Testing, Remediation, and Persistence Students who perform poorly on Computer Adapted

Testing tools for assessment such as Accuplacer or Compass, or on paper-based tests designed and administered at the school level, such as timed diagnostic essay exams often mandated to take courses in developmental reading and developmental writing to help them achieve college-level literacy skills (Sturtz).

In 2000, more than a 1/3of “all undergraduate students receiving financial aid were enrolled in developmental reading courses and 11% of first-time, first-year college students nationwide received some form of developmental reading instruction (Bohr in Caverly).

Remediation has shown a low correlation (sometimes inverse) to student success in higher-level courses (Adelman in Caverly 25).

Connecticut Community College System’s experiences with the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement (Sturtz)

65.6% of students tested and placed into college level courses return for enrollment the following term versus

48.7% of those whose placement scores tracked them for remedial courses.

18% of those recommended for basic level English courses did not take any English course at all

Brett Griffiths

University of Michigan

bgriff@umich.edu