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This article calls for the revision and extension of current informed self-placement models in order to account for students’ dispositions. Placement decisions about writing courses are ultimately an act of knowledge transfer, and as such, dispositions bear great relevance. I argue placement instruments (specifically directed and informed self-placement) neglect to fully realize the complexity and consequence students are faced with when making this decision. Moreover, our research study confirms that (self-)placement decisions are highly influenced by students’ prior dispositions. Using character composites drawn from interview and focus group participants, I identify two dispositional habituses students might embody: liminal and linear. I explore how these dispositional embodiments affect not only students’ decisions about placement but also their continued relevance in students’ academic performance in university writing courses. As the first contact that students have with writing in higher education settings, I contend that students’ decisions would be better supported if placement instruments were conceived of and made with due attention to dispositional factors.
“Why am I here? I have my AP credit. I have my dual enrollment credit. Why am I here wasting my time, not being able to write about what I want to write about?”
— “Caitlyn”
Introduction
Dispositions matter. There is a wide body of scholarship concerning students’ dispositions, but, in general, dispositions are understood to mean that which is concerned with “not only what people can do, but how they tend to invest their capabilities” (Perkins, et. al. 270).1 For some time now, writing program administrators have acknowledged and appreciated the instructional consequences of student affect, as evinced by the endorsement of various “habits of mind” within the 2011 Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Yet despite the import assigned to students’ dispositions within the classroom, concerns related to student dispositions are frequently made to feel tangential to the managerial métier that frequently characterizes the structures involved with the administration of a writing program, specifically placement procedures. In other words, yes, dispositions do matter to WPAs, but, they often matter insofar as they pertain to instructional design and delivery or as they relate to institutional constraints and financial austerity measures.
The frustration expressed above by Caitlyn, however, speaks to how students’ dispositions are intricately bound up in administrative structures like placement. Caitlyn is a freshman at our private, regional, liberal arts university; when I interviewed her, she was enrolled in a pilot section of our recently redesigned first-year writing (FYW) curriculum. Significant, but not unusual, to Caitlyn’s experience in FYW was that it was marked by a choice about placement. As a student who entered with credit for the course, she was balking at our institution-specific requirement that she complete at least one required writing course on site (our institution has two required writing courses; see “Programmatic Background” below). Caitlyn, therefore, had several options regarding placement: she could take her AP credit and opt out of one—but not both—required writing courses, or she could forego her credit altogether and take both required writing courses on our campus. However, in Caitlyn’s view, there was only ever one option: take her credit and opt out of as many required-writing courses allowable. And this still was unacceptable to her. She had her AP credit, after all. Why should she be forced to take any writing course? I contend that an informed self-placement model that accounted for her prior dispositions would have better helped her understand her placement choice, or to understand that she even had a choice in the first place.
This research study indicates that Caitlyn’s prior dispositions inhibited her from believing that she had a choice to make. As the first instance of contact between the student and university-level writing, decisions regarding placement are highly consequential, and, unfortunately due to budgetary and time constraints, all too often forced to the background—by students and writing program administrators alike. Far from being a simple choice of which course to take, the placement decision is rather a highly complex value-judgement that occurs at the intersection of a students’ pasts, presents, and anticipated futures. That is, placement decisions are about transfer; as such, dispositions really matter.
This research seizes upon Heidi Estrem, Dawn Shepherd, and Lloyd Sturman’s call for WPAs to continue to “disrupt placement practices in substantive, creative, and ethical ways” (“Reclaiming” 57). By reading placement practices through the lens of transfer, I work to extend the current scholarship on placement as it relates to dispositions (Driscoll; Sturman), self-efficacy, and student reflection (Estrem, Shepherd, and Sturman, “Reclaiming”) by identifying two new dispositional habituses—liminal and linear—that have the potential to endow students with more agency and self-efficacy in placement decisions. As I discuss in more detail later, a liminal habitus is recursive and attuned to incompleteness; students in this habitus view writing, learning, and indeed themselves, as iterative and constantly in-process. Conversely, a linear student is non-recursive and believes learning happens in a lockstep progression and once a learning outcome box is checked there is no need to return to it since it has ostensibly already been mastered.
In this article, I posit that, as an act of transfer, placement instruments administered to students should be developed so as to account for students’ dispositions. Put differently, the concept of “informed” cuts both ways in placement: the placement instrument should be informed about the students using it, and, through the instrument, students should be informed about the curricular choices before them. To this end, I first review the development of self-placement models (from directed to informed self-placement), and then contextualize our interest in placement and dispositions by providing background information about the curricular changes to our FYW program. I then share the results of my research study based on focus groups and individual interview data gathered from FYW students on our campus. I present the results of this study in the form of composite characters drawn from participants. The results of this study indicate that informed self-placement models can and should be further theorized from a transfer perspective so as to account for students’ dispositions. In the end, this research provides convincing evidence about the relationship between students’ dispositions and placement decisions as well as direction for further placement instrument design.
[1] More specifically, Dana Driscoll and Jennifer Wells have previously defined dispositions as “not knowledge, skills, or abilities,” but “qualities that determine how learners use and adapt their knowledge” (para. 1). In this article, I follow Driscoll and Well’s articulation of dispositions as those affective “habits of mind”—such as openness, persistence, flexibility—which run parallel to students’ cognition but are nevertheless “crucial for learning and transfer” (Reid 293).