Writing our way toward interactive evaluation: Computer-mediated communication, critical pedagogy and hypermedia

This dissertation traces the development of assessment methods in computer-mediated writing instruction from the mainframe-based, computer-assisted instruction programs of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary uses of electronic portfolios. Given changes in information technology and theories of writing assessment, the use of outside standards as the primary tool to judge students' writing performances no longer makes sense. This dissertation charts the possibility of extending the practices of critical pedagogy such as curriculum negotiation and power sharing into the arena of assessment. It demonstrates the potential—even suggests the necessity—of creating communication-based assessments for computer-mediated writing instruction. Situating computer-mediated communication within the historical (re)emergence of composition and rhetoric studies in American higher education allows the interrelations between advances in information technologies and pedagogical developments in composition studies to become clear. Chapter 1 explores the influence of behaviorist models of learning on software development and the early writing process movement. Chapter 2 demonstrates the convergence of interest in revision with the introduction of the word processor; it also explores the correspondence between social constructivism and computers-and-composition specialists' interest in communicative environments such as email lists, bulletin boards, synchronous chats, and MOOs. Building upon social constructivist and post-process theories of composing, Chapter 3 reports on the development of a student-centered, communication-based system of assessment in writing courses at Stevens Institute of Technology. Students in these courses worked on collaborative hypertext research projects and participated in the evaluation of each other's writing. The students' work on peer-evaluations highlighted the frustrations of communication—the tensions among the instructor's, the student writers' and the student readers' intentions and interpretations. Putting a system of communication-based assessment into practice demonstrated the complexity of reading and evaluating; it also created a laboratory within which distributive, interactive, descriptive and situated evaluations were developed. Chapter 4 contextualizes distributive, interactive, descriptive and situated evaluations within the growing body of theory and practice on electronic portfolios. By examining the interactive elements found in students' synchronous communication, asynchronous writing, and collaborative hypermedia projects, Chapter 4 demonstrates that these elements need to be included in systems of assessing student learning and writing.