Download PDFImplications for Extending ISP Design
I have thus far been endeavoring to show how placement decisions are more than acts of cognition, that they should be understood instead as acts of transfer. If the placement decision is in fact an act of transfer, then the instrument used to help students make this complex decision must represent the decision as such. Part of transfer theory (Driscoll and Wells; Gere et al; Perkins et al.; Yancey et al.) is the role of prior knowledge and the way it affects students’ dispositions. In Writing Across Contexts, Kathleen Yancey et al. identify students’ prior knowledge as “points of departure, which functioned as a primary point of reference as they [students] began college composition” (105). Far from being value-neutral, however, these prior experiences heavily influence a student’s dispositional habitus. Ironically, in some cases students whose writerly identities have been represented positively, students who view themselves as “good” writers, are unwilling (or unable) to adopt a growth mindset. That is, they are what Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi term “boundary guarders” (314): students, like Caitlyn, whose dispositions are overly linear, thus preventing them from seeing any value in taking a FYW course. These students believe that their prior high school experiences have sufficiently prepared them to write well at the university.
This “border guarding,” linear disposition clearly bears relevance for students’ placement decisions, yet current theories of ISP almost always neglect to account for the import of students’ informing dispositions. That is, ISP is typically intended to ensure that students are provided “information [that] is readily available and consistent across the college” (Bedore and Rossen-Knill 71). Very rarely, if ever, are placement instruments intended to get students to question and critically examine their prior and informing dispositions about writing. Yet transfer theory suggests that it is precisely students’ prior experiences, or points of departure, and beliefs about writing that need to be brought into question through a placement instrument. In other words, if Caitlyn had more carefully understood and examined her past and, most importantly, the habits of mind about writing that she brought with her to the university, then she might have been able to make a more informed decision about which course is most appropriate for her.
Therefore, one important redesign to the ISP model would be the inclusion of a series of questions that first gets the student to reflect on, interrogate, and openly critique their prior experiences before providing information about future course offerings available to the user. The primary beneficiary of these types of questions would be those students who embody a linear disposition, since students with a more liminal perspective would already be more likely to question their prior experiences and dispositional habitus. Such a series of questions should be interactive and encourage the user to identify and explicitly name their beliefs about writing as well as their identities as writers.
For example, students could be asked to productively reflect on their prior experiences by first responding to the prompt, “In the space provided below, describe the type of writing that you were typically asked to complete in high school. Try to identify your reasons for writing and some key terms which accurately describe how you understand writing.” Students could then be presented with types of writing and some key terminology from their potential university writing courses. Students could then more clearly see where their prior experiences do, or do not, align with their future writing expectations. Another possibility would be to include a survey-element within the placement instrument wherein students respond on a Likert scale to prompts such as “My high school writing courses thoroughly discussed the concept of kairos and its role in rhetorical situations.” These types of questions would throw a student’s prior experiences into momentary doubt, thereby disrupting potentially linear habituses which might hinder students’ placement decisions. Such a disruption would answer Royer and Gilles’ aforementioned call to displace students’ established beliefs long enough to see with more clarity the fullness of their placement decision.
Ultimately, this research confirms that developing an effective and authentic informed self-placement instrument is a highly complex endeavor. If a placement instrument is going to actually enfranchise students in their decision making (indeed if it is going to help them see that there is in fact a decision to be made at all), then it absolutely must simultaneously (1) provide students with information about their course options and (2) make allowances for the dispositional habitus that students bring with them by encouraging students to examine and productively doubt their prior experiences. One way to accomplish these goals is to extend ISP designs to address both the student’s future and past experiences. Placement is, after all, often the first consequential contact writing program administrators have with students coming into our universities; as such, we ought to continue to develop procedures and instruments that pay respect to the complexity of this decision as an act of transfer. Such a placement instrument would work to the benefit of both our students and our writing programs.