The Invisible Gland: Affect and Political Economy

Review of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean Halley. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 313. $84.95 cloth,$23.95 paper.) and The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior, ed. W. Russell Neuman, George E. Marcus, Ann N. Crigler, and Michael MacKuen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 453. $60.00 cloth,$24.00 paper.

Postcritical Theory? Demanding the Possible

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown. (New York: Zone, 2010. Pp. 168, 10 illustrations. $25.95 cloth.)Cosmopolitics I by Isabelle Stengers. Translated by Robert Bononno. (Posthumanities Series, 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. 310.$75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.) Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea by Alberto Toscano. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 304.$26.95 cloth.) Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 288/416. $95 cloth;$26.95 paper.

The Effects of Student-Fashioning and Teacher-Pleasing in the Assessment of First-Year Writing Reflective Essays

The use of reflective essays has become a key artifact of outcome-based writing assessment in the field of writing studies (White, 2005). However, scoring reflective essays may be influenced by textual features irrelevant to most outcomes and assessment rubrics.  Two problematic features are teacher-pleasing, which Yancey (1996) called the “schmooze factor,” and student-fashioning, which Miura (2018) related to identity formation. In this article, we present two mixed methods studies to examine the effects of these particular textual features on the direct assessment of first-year writing (FYW) reflective essays. In the first pilot study, we identified four textual features relevant to teacher-pleasing and student-fashioning. In the second quasi-experimental study, we created a sample of FYW essays with and without these features. Two assessment teams then scored the essays in order to determine whether these features had statistically significant effects on assessment scores. The empirical results of these linked studies indicate these features did not have significant effects in a direct assessment of FYW reflective essays. However, in the discussion and conclusion, we argue our mixed methods approach offers a feasible and efficient set of research methods to examine specific textual features in the direct assessments of student writing. Keywords: writing assessment, first year writing (FYW), reflection, reflective essays, mixed method

Slouching Toward Sustainability: Mixed Methods in the Direct Assessment of Student Writing

The development of present-day assessment culture in higher education has led to a disciplinary turn away from statistical definitions of reliability and validity in favor of methods argued to have more potential for positive curricular change. Such interest in redefining reliability and validity also may be inspired by the unsustainable demands that large-scale quantitative assessment would place on composition programs. In response to this dilemma, we tested a mixed-methods approach to writing assessment that combined large-scale quantitative assessment using thin-slice methods with targeted, smaller-scale qualitative assessment of selected student writing using rich features analysis. We suggest that such an approach will allow composition programs to (a) directly assess a representative sample of student writing with excellent reliability, (b) significantly reduce total assessment time, and (c) preserve the autonomy and contextualized quality of assessment sought in current definitions of validity