Race and Writing Assessment

Book excerpt: This book won the 2014 CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) Outstanding Book Award - Edited Collection Race and Writing Assessment brings together established and up-and-coming scholars in composition studies to explore how writing assessments needs to change in order to account for the increasing diversity of students in college classrooms today. Contributors identify where we have ignored race in our writing assessment approaches and explore issues related to assessment technologies, faculty and student responses to assessment, institutional responses to writing assessment, and context for assessing writing beyond composition programs. Balancing practical advice and theoretical discussions, Race and Writing Assessment provides a variety of models, frameworks, and research methods to consider writing assessment approaches that are sensitive to the linguistic and cultural identities that diverse students bring to writing classrooms. This book illustrates that this is no one-size-fits-all model for addressing diversity in assessment practice but that assessment practices attuned to racial diversity must be rooted in the contexts in which they are found. In doing so, Race and Writing Assessment enriches contemporary research on contextualized approaches to writing assessment.