Because source use is a key academic literacy skill tied to students’ socialization into the university, scholars have called for more research on how novice second language (L2) writers’ use of sources changes over time as they engage with disciplinary discourse. The present study, therefore, tracked the semester-long development of thirty undergraduate L2 students’ source use in a research writing seminar course. Each student wrote two research papers for the course, providing sixty papers for both quantitative and qualitative text analysis. The researcher conducted data analysis in terms of citation density, source type, citation type, and source use purpose. Findings showed that students’ engagement with scholarly articles led to formulation of new citation patterns: incorporation of research summaries and frequent use of nonintegral citations. In addition, citation density increased overall, with scholarly sources newly used in theoretical orientations to John M. Swales’s CARS model. Nonetheless, students’ papers demonstrated a lack of proficiency in the sophisticated aspects of source use. The discussion concludes with suggestions for source use instruction in line with students’ understanding of disciplinary discourse.

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.

Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment.