Special Issue: Writing Across the Curriculum and Assessment: Activities, Programs, and Insights at the Intersection

Writing Assessment, assessment, student writing, Writing Program, writing program administration, faculty development, CAC, Culture

Published December 3, 2009

Guest editors: The Florida State University Editorial Collective (Kathleen Blake Yancey; Emily Baker; Scott Gage; Ruth Kistler; Rory Lee; Natalie Syzmanski; Kara Taczak; and Jill Taylor)

In 1997, Brian Huot and Kathleen Blake Yancey published their co-edited volume Assessing Writing across the Curriculum: Diverse Approaches and Practices. In this volume, contributors explored various ways of assessing WAC programs, moving theoretically, ethnographically, administratively, and rhetorically to document the efficacy of such programs. During the last decade, we've seen this work expand, in the process frequently leading to new WAC-related innovations. Several programs, for example. have moved from WAC to CAC—from Writing across the Curriculum to Communication across the Curriculum—so as to incorporate multiple kinds of communication into a writing-rich but not writing-exclusive curriculum. Other WAC programs, like George Mason University's and North Carolina State University's, have used assessment activities as one component in a larger WAC research study. And still others, like researchers at the University of Hawaii, have focused on the student experience, drawing from collective interviews new lessons for WAC administrators and program designers. In sum, the last decade has produced new ways of thinking about WAC as well as new ways of thinking about how to assess WAC. This special issue of ATD explores how assessment can help us understand, support, and enrich all such WAC efforts, and outline why and how assessment is an appropriate mechanism for doing so.

Special Issue: Writing Across the Curriculum and Assessment: Activities, Programs, and Insights at the Intersection

Published December 3, 2009

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