Writing assessment programs help place entering and mid-career students in composition courses at the appropriate level, monitor the progress of those students, and assist in placing them in writing courses throughout their undergraduate careers. These same universities also have writing instruction programs, which might include writing centers, writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives, and freshman and advanced composition programs. At many institutions, though, writing assessment is not necessarily considered fundamental to writing instruction, and there is little communication between the assessment program and the composition program. This book demonstrates that writing assessment and instruction programs may be successfully integrated. The contributors analyze the development of the writing assessment and instruction program at Washington State University, which is nationally recognized for its success. In doing so, they provide guidance to other institutions planning to develop similar integrated programs. The volume argues that writing assessment and instruction should inform and influence each other; that they should evolve together; and that they should be developed locally. By tracing the success of the WSU program, the authors directly challenge the use of national packaged assessment programs, such as standardized placement tests.

Colleges and universities across the US have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students' learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess how students' learning is affected by faculty members' efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.

Writing assessment programs help place entering and mid-career students in composition courses at the appropriate level, monitor the progress of those students, and assist in placing them in writing courses throughout their undergraduate careers. These same universities also have writing instruction programs, which might include writing centers, writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives, and freshman and advanced composition programs. At many institutions, though, writing assessment is not necessarily considered fundamental to writing instruction, and there is little communication between the assessment program and the composition program. This book demonstrates that writing assessment and instruction programs may be successfully integrated.

The contributors analyze the development of the writing assessment and instruction program at Washington State University, which is nationally recognized for its success. In doing so, they provide guidance to other institutions planning to develop similar integrated programs. The volume argues that writing assessment and instruction should inform and influence each other; that they should evolve together; and that they should be developed locally. By tracing the success of the WSU program, the authors directly challenge the use of national packaged assessment programs, such as standardized placement tests.

The post-modern conviction that meaning is indeterminate and self is an illusion, though fascinating and defensible in theory, leaves a number of scholarly and pedagogical questions unsatisfied. Authoring the phenomenological act or felt sense of creating a text is "a remarkably black box," say Haswell and Haswell, yet it should be one of the central preoccupations of scholars in English studies. Not only can the study of authoring accommodate the "social turn" since post-modernism, they argue, but it accommodates as well conceptions of, and the lived experience of, personal potentiality and singularity.