Low-Stakes, Reflective Writing: Moving Students into Their Professional Fields

This study examines low-stakes, written commentaries from a graduate counseling course to better understand the role writing plays in the transition from being a student to becoming a professional practitioner. The cross disciplinary research team used methods from Grounded Theory to analyze 60 commentaries and found that: (1) low-stakes, reflective writing revealed changes in self-awareness from Situational Self-Knowledge to Pattern Self-Knowledge (Weinstein & Alschuler, 1985); (2) low-stakes writing provided evidence of students connecting personally to learning and then connecting learning to professional practice; and (3) low-stakes writing encouraged the instructor to make mid-course adjustments to his teaching methods. This study provides empirical evidence that low-stakes writing-to-learn both supports and records the transition students make from hoping to know how to knowing how to imagine themselves in their professional field

Editor’s Introduction: Assessing Writing Programs and Their Impacts on Students

This editor's column provides an overview of Tamara Tate and Mark Warschauer's "Access, Digital Writing, and Achievement," Mary Stewart’s “Confronting the Ideologies of Assimilation and Colorblindness in Writing Program Assessment through Antiracist Dynamic Criteria Mapping," and Analeigh Horton's “Two Sisters and a Heuristic for Listening to Multilingual, International Students’ Directed Self-Placement Stories.

Editor’s Introduction: Contract Grading, Portfolios, and Reflection

The articles in this issue examine the continuing use and development of contract grading in college and high school writing courses (DasBender et al. and Watson); time and labor as important influences despite most often being seen as outside of the construct of writing (Del Principe); and the treatment of reflection within writing assessment theory and practice (Ratto Parks)

Editors' Introduction: Volume 9 Issue 2

Editors Introduction to Volume 9 Issue