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148 books match the query 'Evaluation' and 8 start with w

cover of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University

Wannabe U

Inside the Corporate University

Gaye Tuchman

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Based on years of observation at a large state university, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. In this eye-opening exposé of the modern university, Tuchman paints a candid portrait of the corporatization of higher education and its impact on students and faculty. 

Like the best campus novelists, Tuchman entertains with her acidly witty observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately Wannabe U is a hard-hitting account of how higher education’s misguided pursuit of success fails us all.

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cover of What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

What We Really Value

Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

Bob Broad

Utah State University Press, 2003

What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow.

To illustrate the complex and indispensable insights this method can provide, Broad details findings from his study of eighty-nine distinct and substantial criteria for evaluation at work in the introductory composition program at "City University." These chapters are filled with the voices of composition instructors debating and reflecting on the nature, interplay, and relative importance of the many criteria by which they judged students' texts. Broad concludes his book with specific strategies that can help writing instructors and programs to discover, negotiate, map, and express a more robust truth about what they value in their students' rhetorical performances.

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cover of Working Together for Change: Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design, Volume 5

Working Together for Change

Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design, Volume 5

Edited by Lisa M. Vaughn, Sara Neyer, and Kathie Maynard

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Strategies for engaging key stakeholders—evaluators, researchers, and designers—to discuss frameworks for promoting collaborative change.

Collaborative Change Research, Evaluation, and Design (CCRED) is a framework and collection of participatory practices that engage people and the systems around them to drive community outcomes. This framework emerged out of the recognition that deep participation (or engagement) is frequently missing in collaborative impact approaches. When collaborative change is implemented effectively, community members are viewed as valuable owners and experts instead of being seen as disinterested or unqualified partners.

CCRED is a social action process with dual goals of collective empowerment and the deepening of social knowledge. Executed successfully, CCRED has the potential to increase the rigor, reach, and relevance of research, evaluation, and design translated to meaningful action. Written in an easily accessible, narrative style, Working Together for Change, the fourth volume in the Interdisciplinary Community Engaged Research for Health series edited by Farrah Jacquez and Lela Svedin brings together evaluators, researchers, and designers to describe collaborative change by describing their own work in the space.

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cover of Writing Across Cultures

Writing Across Cultures

Robert Eddy

Utah State University Press, 2019

Writing Across Cultures invites both new and experienced teachers to examine the ways in which their training has—or has not—prepared them for dealing with issues of race, power, and authority in their writing classrooms. The text is packed with more than twenty activities that enable students to examine issues such as white privilege, common dialects, and the normalization of racism in a society where democracy is increasingly under attack. This book provides an innovative framework that helps teachers create safe spaces for students to write and critically engage in hard discussions.
 
Robert Eddy and Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar offer a new framework for teaching that acknowledges the changing demographics of US college classrooms as the field of writing studies moves toward real equity and expanding diversity. Writing Across Cultures utilizes a streamlined cross-racial and interculturally tested method of introducing students to academic writing via sequenced assignments that are not confined by traditional and static approaches. They focus on helping students become engaged members of a new culture—namely, the rapidly changing collegiate discourse community. The book is based on a multi-racial rhetoric that assumes that writing is inherently a social activity. Students benefit most from seeing composing as an act of engaged communication, and this text uses student samples, not professionally authored ones, to demonstrate this framework in action.
 
Writing Across Cultures will be a significant contribution to the field, aiding teachers, students, and administrators in navigating the real challenges and wonderful opportunities of multi-racial learning spaces.
 
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cover of Writing Groups in the Writing Center: Negotiating Authority and Expertise in Collaborative Learning

Writing Groups in the Writing Center

Negotiating Authority and Expertise in Collaborative Learning

Sara Wilder

Utah State University Press, 2025

Writing Groups in the Writing Center presents an empirical, qualitative study that examines collaborative practices in multidisciplinary writing groups, arguing that these collaborations offer rich expansions of writing center praxis. Using three case studies—undergraduate grant proposal writers, undergraduate thesis writers, and doctoral dissertation writers—the book explores how participants negotiate authority, navigate disciplinary boundaries, perform emotional labor, and develop expertise within writing center communities of practice.

As many higher education institutions strive to create spaces and systems that increase equity, accessibility, and diversity, they recognize the need for improved mentorship across academic levels. This book analyzes the significant benefits as well as the challenges faced by writing groups in providing such support. Wilder presents a nuanced account of how facilitators scaffold group practice, how members use and build genre knowledge across disciplines, and how institutional contexts shape emotional labor requirements.

For educators and tutors, the book provides an in-depth examination of the facilitator role, describing essential logistical, emotional, and intellectual practices, and addresses common conflicts and challenges. Administrators can find valuable material for training tutor-facilitators and frameworks for conceptualizing writing group functions on campus. For researchers, the book extends scholarship on writing groups, writing transfer, and collaborative learning, bridging writing center and broader writing studies research.

In an era of concern about generative AI’s role in writing education, Writing Groups in the Writing Center extends research on group facilitation, collaborative learning, and authority negotiation in writing center communities of practice and emphasizes the human connections that make collaborative writing meaningful and valuable for student writers.
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cover of Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education

Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges

The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education

Jessica Nastal

University Press of Colorado, 2023

Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges brings together two-year college teacher-scholar-activists from across the U.S. to share stories, strategies, and data about local efforts at reforming writing placement assessment to advance educational access and equity. The chapters in this edited collection help faculty and writing program administrators navigate the shifting landscape of placement in the 2020s. Contributors demonstrate how two-year colleges have addressed local and state-level pressures for reform, especially at a time when the nation has been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic with its inequitable economic, social, and physical toll.
 
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cover of Writing Recommendation Letters: The Discourse of Evaluation in Academic Settings

Writing Recommendation Letters

The Discourse of Evaluation in Academic Settings

Mohammed Albakry and Clint Bryan

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Even though reading and writing recommendation letters is one of the essential service tasks of the professorial life of academics, there are few resources to train graduate students and junior academics on how to draft a successful recommendation letter for different academic purposes. Writing Recommendation Letters draws linguistic and rhetorical principles from close to a thousand real-world examples of academic letters of recommendation. As a result, the research that informs the pedagogy is extensive, current, and highly relevant to the discourse of evaluation in academic settings with findings that have implications for genre-based writing instruction, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and teaching of academic literacies. The authors are two experienced college professors who regularly teach graduate students and mentor young academics, so the reflection questions and instructor suggestions they provide were designed for today’s university classroom. The result is an instructive book that translates academic discourse structures and principles into accessible language, supplying authentic examples and ample writing practice. 

Key Features
  • Readers will learn the theoretical context that defines the genre of letters of recommendation. 
  • The book highlights the similarities and differences between the three different types of letters of recommendation: letters written for graduate admission, letters written in support of fellowship applications, and letters written to support obtaining a faculty position. 
  • Chapters on different aspects of linguistic and rhetorical features discuss presenting the applicants' credentials, highlighting the strengths of their character, accentuating and downplaying certain traits, as well as the pros and cons of boilerplate language and the use of customary frames for opening and closing.
  • Readers will see real-world examples of actual letters of recommendation to see how seasoned faculty build the case for the applicant.
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cover of Writing and School Reform: Writing Instruction in the Age of Common Core and Standardized Testing

Writing and School Reform

Writing Instruction in the Age of Common Core and Standardized Testing

Joanne Addison

University Press of Colorado, 2017

In Writing and School Reform, Joanne Addison and Sharon James McGee respond to a testing and accountability movement that has imposed increasingly stronger measures of control over our classrooms, shifted teaching away from best practices, and eroded teacher and student agency. Drawing on historical and empirical research, Writing and School Reform details the origins of the accountability movement, explores its emerging effects on the teaching of writing, and charts a path forward that reasserts the agency of teachers and researchers in the field.
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