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Problematizing Models of Placement: From Directed Self-Placement (DSP) to Informed Self-Placement
Ensuring that incoming students enroll in an appropriate university writing course has been a long-standing vexation for writing program administrators. Typically, student placement has relied on either (1) highly efficient but decontextualized national tests, such as the SAT or ACT, or (2) more authentic but extremely laborious placement instruments, such as writing portfolios. Directed self-placement (DSP) originated in response to mounting concerns over the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of these traditional placement procedures (Huot; Jones) as well as widespread dissatisfaction across all stakeholders—students, faculty, and administrators alike—with the use of standardized measures of assessment to socialize students into the university (Blakesley; Royer and Gilles, “Directed”). Moreover, standardized measures of assessment (like the SAT or ACT) are neither valid or reliable as placement instruments; nor were they ever intended to act as the basis for awarding institutional course credit (Estrem, Shepherd, and Duman, “Relentless” 111). “The most effective writing placement systems,” argue Estrem, Shepherd, and Duman, “encourage student self-efficacy through engaging them in the placement process” (112). This, ostensibly, was the promise of DSP.
Proponents of DSP argue for its elegant simplicity—its ability to “Do it better, do less” (Royer and Gilles, “The Pragmatist” 55), its high levels of reliability coupled with low costs (Cornell and Newton; Jones), and its ability to imbue agency in students through perceived choice (Pinter and Sims; Royer and Gilles “What Is”). On the surface, it would seem, DSP addresses and resolves many of the issues that have plagued traditional models of student placement. However, DSP was never intended to be a perfect or a prescriptive model, and two important critiques have been recently leveled at DSP instruments as they are usually articulated and enacted. First, the constructs of writing—or beliefs about what is valued in writing and how writing gets done—that are typically represented in DSPs are largely relics of a current-traditional view of composition, and second, the actual amount of student agency allowed by DSP is, at best, questionable. In what follows, I more fully unpack both of these critiques and explore the intersection of placement models and transfer theory before discussing programmatic background and methodology that informs this research.
In order for any given writing assessment to be considered valid and, therefore, be of any practical use, there must be explicit alignment between the framing of writing in the assessment and the aspects of writing that are actually valued by the assessors. DSP should indeed be considered a form of assessment since it asks students to evaluate their ability to write in future scenarios based on prior experiences. Notably, this is a step that Daniel Royer and Roger Giles miss in their contention that the only two variables are the student and the curriculum (2003, “The Pragmatist” 54). Between the student and the curriculum still stands the assessment instrument, stripped down though it may be. Therefore, as Edward White, Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham argue, it is absolutely essential that placement instruments and procedures “reproduce as nearly as possible the rhetorical situation students would meet in their classes” (40). Important to note also is that this rhetorical situation imperative does not necessitate that a placement instrument require students to write, only that it accurately represents the writing construct that manifests in the classroom. In most DSP models, writing constructs are often conveyed to students via a self-reflective questionnaire or skills-oriented statements, accompanied at times by writing and reading samples (Chernekoff; Elbow; Frus; Reynolds). In a longitudinal study investigating the validity of DSP at the University of Michigan, Anne Gere et al. found “DSP questions were not well aligned with the FYW construct of writing because they assessed students on a number of capabilities that were largely irrelevant in FYW” (161). This finding is legitimate cause for concern because it would seem that DSP falls prey to the same ideological disconnect that plagues standardized measures of assessment. However, the value that DSP maintains over national testing instruments is that it is highly flexible and adaptable to local contextualities (Nicolay), thus making it entirely salvageable as a placement model so long as it is attuned to the locally valued constructs of writing.
Just as troublesome as the construct of writing represented by a given DSP is how much—or how little—agency DSP instruments realistically afford students given that placement instruments are intended to direct student decisions, and not (necessarily) enable student choice. Originally heralded as the new democratic ideal for placement procedures, the rightful restoration of agency and self-determination to the student (Royer & Gilles, “The Pragmatist” 61), DSP has ironically been criticized for engendering at best a reductive reading of choice and at worst a false narrative about agency (Ketai). Empowering students is, of course, a worthwhile pursuit, but simply presenting students with a wide berth of information and leaving them to their own devices does not, or should not, be equated with romantic notions of enfranchisement. On the contrary, the more likely scenario is it is irresponsible for writing program administrators to ask first-time university students to shoulder such a load without support—that it “disempowers students by asking them [students] to make a judgement without the benefit of expertise” (Nicolay 43). A more responsible administrative practice would be to construct a placement apparatus that ensures that the information provided can be put to practical and deliberate use by students. We need to ensure, in other words, “that the choices [offered] are received as intended, and that information is readily available and consistent” (Bedore and Rossen-Knill 71). This revised placement model has been coined Informed Self-Placement (ISP). An ISP instrument as articulated by Pamela Bedore and Deborah Rossen-Knill differs from traditional DSP instruments in that it is non-directive; that is, it does not use the student’s responses on a questionnaire to make a value judgment for the student. Rather, the ISP instrument’s intent is to provide the incoming student with rich institutional information so that she, the student, can make a placement decision for herself. To this end, an ISP is highly attuned to providing students with rich and accurate institutional information. The guiding assumption within an ISP model is that, given the appropriate amount of information (about the university, that is), a student will be empowered to make an informed choice.
However, the reality is that choice in general, but particularly with regard to placement, is “a complex rhetorical act” (Lewiecki-Wilson 165). While an informed self-placement is a productive development from directed self-placement, I argue that current articulations of ISP instruments are still incomplete because they continue to conceive of the relationship between choice and information from an institutional perspective; that is, the ISP instrument is concerned with giving information to the student. But student placement decisions are, I contend, more complex than simply making more information available to them. I recognize that there are many complicating factors that can play into students’ decision to place into or out of a given university writing course. Moreover, we ought to use research on these nuances to guide our thinking about how to best design an ISP. Two such complicating elements that unequivocally influence student choice within an ISP but have heretofore been under-examined are knowledge transfer and student dispositions. This is not to say, obviously, that transfer and student dispositions have gone untheorized in composition studies, but rather that the full import of these related fields of research has not been brought to bear in an administrative capacity.
Placement as Transfer
There is no shortage of scholarship pertaining to writing-related notions of transfer; however, these conversations have largely been confined to the classroom and framed as pedagogical concerns (Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick; Beach; Moore; Nowacek; Robertson, Taczak, and Yancy; Wardle). While, the writing-related research is indeed diverse, it has yet to be well-theorized for uses outside of instruction or in writing program administration. The paucity of administrative application for transfer is admittedly surprising given that placement is, at perhaps its most basic, a problem of transfer. “Into which class,” a student must ask, “will my prior experiences best transfer?” In order to provide appropriate support in the facilitation of this transfer, ISP could benefit greatly from integrating some lessons learned from pedagogy-minded transfer. For example, there is a general consensus in transfer theory that metacognition is “a key link to students’ ability to develop the knowledges required for success when repurposed in other writing contexts” (Taczak and Robertson). So, an ISP model should be designed with the intention of not only informing students about the constructs of writing they will encounter, but it necessarily must also be deeply dialogic. It ought to be intentionally developed so as to encourage “high-road” transfer, thus fostering a meaningful conversation about the students’ past, present, and future writing selves.
Moreover, it is not enough for students to think declaratively about the intersections of their prior and future writing experiences, they must exhibit procedural knowledge in order to put that metacognition to effective, decision-making use between two dissonant constructs of writing (i.e. high school writing and university-level writing). To this point, Angela Rounsaville is worth citing at length:
[T]ransfer means more than just the ability to apply one textual convention or strategy to another, dissimilar type. Rather, it implies . . . that identities, ways of knowing, goals, and emotions all play a role in how writers move between genres. More importantly, it shows how these extra-textual aspects of uptake are not additions to genre knowledge, but rather deeply intertwined with how and why writers make sense of and act as they do at genre convergences. (para. 24)
In other words, students’ placement decisions vis-à-vis knowledge transfer are more than acts of cognition; they are, again, highly complex rhetorical acts which encompass a myriad of elements beyond the availability of information. Embedded, but largely ignored, in the socio-academic milieu of a student’s placement decision are dispositional considerations. Only recently has research begun to examine the relationship between transfer and dispositions, which is ironic given that the Council for Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project collaborated in 2011 to endorse eight “Habits of Mind” essential for success in postsecondary writing.
This review of the research, then, reveals a scarcity of scholarship related to transfer and dispositions (Driscoll and Wells; McCune and Entwistle; Perkins et al.), and even then, much like transfer, the discussion is framed as a matter of pedagogy, not administration. Rare though it may be, the research on dispositions and transfer is exceptionally relevant for the development of a productive ISP. As Driscoll and Wells unequivocally state, “dispositions matter—generative dispositions, like a student’s willingness to self-regulate or to positively value writing, will assist in their ability to transfer knowledge” (para. 43). Furthermore, the importance of accounting for the affective power of students’ dispositions is amplified when we consider that not only do dispositions affect transfer in the immediate, but students’ initially-formulated dispositions continue to hold sway in how students assign value to a given task later in their academic endeavors (Wigfield and Eccles 78). So, dispositions will also significantly affect the value they assign to future writing scenarios and, subsequently, their willingness to engage with writing. Dispositions, it would seem then, are of extreme consequence and are thus worthy of careful administrative attention.
The literature shows that there is strong evidence, in theory, for a meaningful connection between students’ placement decisions and the role of dispositions therein. What is missing is concrete evidence of this relationship, concrete evidence that students’ placement decisions involve more than making an informed choice. I posit that a more comprehensive representation of placement understands it to be an act of transfer, and as such, placement instruments should not only inform students about their curricular choices, but the placement instrument itself would be informed about the students using it. What is needed is research directed at uncovering in more specific ways how the “informed” aspect of an ISP could cut both ways, more evidence about how and why a placement instrument could be informed about students as much as it informs students about their potential courses. In the follow section, I discuss some of the programmatic changes to the FYW program that provided the exigence for our thinking about student dispositions and placement models.