The Myth of Measurable Improvement

Late this past summer, my wife and I returned terize them as precise. Here again, therefore, we from a trip to the west coast to a rather startling have the Myth of Measurable Improvement. sight. We had been away for about ten days, and in that time, one of my pumpkin plants had Assumptions exploded across a large section of the back lawn. How then should we evaluate student writing if My pepper plants, too, had burst into flame, ripe our estimations seem particularly crude and red peppers like tongues of fire, licking out at the imprecise? Actually, the answer is not so much how, green stems. for many fine methods remain at our disposal, but Although I had nurtured these plants with litwhen to evaluate. I believe teachers of English, tle success throughout the summer, under benign writing instructors, should withhold judgment of neglect they had apparently thrived. Or had they? a student's progress until a suitable period of time Later, I comforted myself with the realization that has elapsed which would indeed allow for measthese peppers had indeed been growing all along; urable growth. We should not look for day-to-day I simply had to turn away for a week or so to growth, especially if our method of assessing that ascertain this growth. Prior to our holiday, I had growth is so imprecise. I base this prohibition on been estimating their growth---or lack of it-using premature evaluation of growth on three no refined tool or instrument; yet I assumed that assumptions. I could pass judgment on the state of these plants 1. The writing tasks we require of our students are so from my day-to-day evaluations. Such is the "myth varied that daily, or even weekly, evaluations ultimately of measurable improvement." become confounded with the variance of the written I borrow this phrase from Cy Knoblauch and assignments themselves. One particular student may Lil Brannon, lifting it specifically from Rhetorical perform marvelously in the descriptive mode, Traditions and the Teaching of Writing (1984). After while she languishes in her attempts to produce all, my topic is writing, not vegetables. As teachers quality exposition. Is she slipping? Has her proof English, we, too, perpetuate a fallacy if we congress fallen off? Her classmate writes an abysmal tinue to believe that we can measure growth in business letter, yet the following week he produces writing using crude estimations in a day-by-day a marvelously expressive narration. My, how he manner. That our evaluations are crude might be has improved! Few of us are duped, of course, demonstrated by simply asking twenty teachers to into making such spurious evaluations of such varrate a particular student text. These evaluations ied examples of discourse. This same spuriousness will no doubt vary considerably. Experience has exists, however, in our insistence on providing a shown that such variations will occur with any summative evaluation of business letters, or pertype of text with any group of teachers. We like to suasive essays, or literary compositions. The stuthink of our evaluations as reliable-and I think dents write each under a different context, in a they are-and valid, yet we could hardly characdifferent frame of mind, often for a different