Review of Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment Vols. 1 & 2

Abstract

Editors Diane Kelly-Riley, Ti Macklin, and Carl Whithaus have curated an excellent list of chapters about the many complex challenges facing the field of writing assessment in their collection Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment Volume 1: Technical and Political Contexts and Volume 2: Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practices. This edited collection is part of the “Perspectives on Writing” series of books and focuses on articles gathered from the Journal of Writing Assessment. Volume 1 of this collection offers a wide range of chapters related to the relationship between reliability and validity, the role of politics in designing a program’s writing assessment structure, and the effects of automated scoring on both the assessment of writing and writing itself. Volume 2 dissects many additional challenges related to writing assessment including how fairness complicates and enhances conversations about reliability and validity and a closer examination of the lived experiences of students and educators in an assessment environment. Taken together, these volumes showcase powerful discussions about the current state of writing assessment in the twenty-first century and will benefit any educator or scholar in the field of technical and professional communication.