What are the outcomes of a course designed for English majors that teaches empirical research methods and uses quantitative and qualitative data collection? This question is of particular importance as students majoring in English typically do not engage in empirical research but are accustomed to humanistic inquiry or creative activity. Although there has been considerable research on assessment of outcomes of undergraduate research on STEM students (Lopatto; Seymour, et al), to date, no assessment of outcomes has been done on this population. We--all enrolled in just such a course--approached this research question through mixed methods: Content analysis of the syllabus; Content analysis of anonymized end-of-term reflections written by the students; Survey of students who have successfully completed the course (n=90); Interviews of the two instructors of the course.

Stephanie West-Puckett argues for open badging as an alternative born-digital assessment paradigm that can, when attendant to critical validity inquiry, promote full participation and more equitable outcomes for students of color and lower income students. Her case study of digital badging in first-year composition demonstrates how students and teachers can negotiate “good writing,” interrupting bias through the co-creation of digital badges that demystify disciplinary knowledge and serve as portable assessment objects that build social capital across contexts.

This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments? This issue aims to foreground the perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is no doubt that the first step toward projects of social justice writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social the project of socially just writing assessment. The guest editors argue that there is much to be learned by making the writing assessment “scene,” as Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.

Race and class are deeply embedded in the way the field and teachers think about linguistic and written performance. Yet, addressing and understanding racial and linguistic prejudice remains important to the fairness of one’s pedagogies, assessment practices, and curricular development. The author argues that social justice approaches to assessment require instructors and program administrators to rethink assessment concepts such as reliability and validity with an eye toward the ways disadvantage is embedded in the very construct task responses and assessment materials used to define quality writing. Because historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) present a unique blend of culturally relevant teaching and traditional (i.e., White) definitions of quality writing, they provide a unique site for inquiry into questions of writing assessment and social justice. Specifically, in engaging with the push-pull legacy toward language use and race that is found at HBCUs, the author indicates ways we might enable teachers, administrators, and students to resist monolingual, racialized consequences embedded in their views of writing assessment and rethink the foundational measurement concepts of reliability, validity, and fairness.

The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

The translingual turn has prompted various attempts at bringing “translingual writing” into various curricula. However, if such writing, indeed any writing, continues to be bound to prevailing assessment practices, then we potentially sustain and exacerbate inequitable sociolinguistic economies and relations. Lee argues that questions of whether to invite and how to assess translingual writing are secondary to questions of how to go about translanguaging assessment, which entails the application of theoretical tenets of translingualism toward a reimagination of existing assessment ecologies.

ost writing assessment at the college level is geared toward “homegrown” or “traditional” students: the ones who start their first year of college education at the same institution from which they later graduate. Assessment at Alexander’s institution was mostly effective for those same students but was less successful for some transfer students, as shown in assessment data. Instead of trying to force those students to learn the “norm” standards, the author, as WPA, began conversations with faculty at the community colleges where these students begin their college careers to determine how to honor the many different writing knowledges that these students bring to the classroom. Looked at through a lens of queer theory, this is the path to “queering” writing assessment.

Decisions about writing assessment are rooted in racial and linguistic identity; the consequences for many writing assessment decisions are often reflective of the judgments made about who does and does not deserve opportunities for success, opportunities historically denied to students of color and linguistically diverse writers. Put simply, assessment creates or denies opportunity structures. Because writing assessment is also racially and linguistically affected by the identities of those performing assessment, the role of writing program administrator (WPA) becomes a social justice role that challenges racial and linguistic biases and interrogates institutional structures, so that all students have the same opportunities for success.

Decades of research on rater training and scoring practices demonstrates that raters' preferences for writing quality are malleable; for instance, it is customary to "calibrate" raters' scoring decisions through documents like scoring protocols and rubrics. This essay argues that while rubrics from contemporary large-scale writing assessments (and the local assessments they inspire) maintain retrograde assumptions about language variation, relatively small adjustments to these rubrics could help raters and candidates establish what Joseph Williams once called "the ordinary kind of contract" that readers and writers routinely observe anywhere outside of testing contexts.

The essay reports the findings of a study of 911 students’ academic outcomes in relation to their placement profiles and a closer, qualitative analysis of 54 participating

This review takes on the assumption that readers of College English believe in democratic practice and the possibility that education can play a role in supporting and cultivating those practices. The books reviewed here are a good reminder that education does not have to be focused on competition and achievement, about defining intelligence through academic aptitude, a reminder well served as the Common Core and its impending assessment shape the nature of public education and its goals.

Critics of contemporary higher education frequently overlook an important dimension of assessment of student learning: namely, the social and economic consequences used to justify the assessment measures in the first place. This essay argues that meaningful student assessment must take into account the unintended, transferable utility of liberal higher education. The authors, from a large master’s-comprehensive state university, use a recent survey of alumni of their English degree program from as far back as the 1960s to assess the importance that the degree has had in the lives of former students. Believing that disciplinary differences may help us to understand the navigational courses that emerge as seemingly nonlinear and unpredictable paths from the college degree to the life after college, the authors use students’ responses to identify how, where, and what students have used from their English courses in their most recent professions and, in turn, the limitations of current value-added assessments such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become “common sense” in higher education, this article shows that the concept of outcomes tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and contests the technical rationality of the managerial university. Though I challenge outcomes assessment, I recognize that OA is the coin of the educational realm. Therefore, this article outlines ways to frame and use educational aims to minimize the negative tendencies of outcomes assessment and to maximize the positive tendencies of “consequential assessment.”

In facing policymakers who are pressuring us for objective assessment of our programs, we should not assume that a narrow set of traditional scientific methods and conventions will guarantee acceptance of our knowledge claims. Nor should we assume that our methods and methodologies that fall outside those tight boundaries will be unfairly treated. Rather, we need to have at our disposal the full range of what we know and how we know it as we engage with such policymakers, who—like the rest of us—are sometimes moved in mysterious ways.

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years, it turned its attention to validity. Overall, the field has exhibited a tension between reliability and validity, with the latter increasingly being conceptualized as involving a whole set of considerations that need to be theorized.

ind the gap."The prerecorded caution on the London tube aims to protect fast-moving travelers from falling as they leave the train.That caution has metaphorical resonance for those of us who require students to go public with their writing and those of us who assess student writing, which is to say, all of us.Requiring students to make their writing public has become a given in many composition classrooms, while assessing student writing-in our overlapping roles as readers, graders, teachers, scholars, and administrators-has become the high-speed train of our professional work, hurtling us forward, sometimes without enough time to consider where we're going.Whether we mandate these activities (requiring students to exchange drafts), have them mandated (designing an assessment plan for our program) or, as in most cases, negotiate the ever-contested space between the two, these activities share the assumption that they are performed for the common educational good.Taken together, these three works ask us to reexamine our assumptions about assessing student writing, requiring students to make their writing public, and theo-Bet h K al i k off is assistant professor of writing studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts and SciencesProgram at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Reviewed are:Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text, edited by Emily J. Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson; Re(Articulating) Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning, by Brian Huot; and What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, by Bob Broad.

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

ssessment is a peculiar field within college English studies. In one sense, every faculty member is engaged directly in it, assigning, responding to, and grading student papers; many members of English departments also participate in one way or another in placement testing for entering students or in mid-career or exit writing assessments for more advanced students. In another sense, external assessment of our work is always there in subtle and unacknowledged ways, defining what we do and how well we do it, how much power we can exert in controlling our curriculum, and how our scholarly work is valued. In this second sense, even more than in the first, assessment affects the way our work is perceived by others inside and outside the academy and hence helps determine the resources we receive for everything from duplicating to new faculty positions. The common misperceptions of our fieldthat as writing teachers we are picky grammarians and value flowery prose or as literature teachers we are irresponsible revolutionaries, for instance-are damaging cliches that arise in large part from assessment gone awry. Once we are evaluated as unable to fulfill our roles, no one in a position of power need take seriously our claims, and our discipline becomes easy to dismiss as an expensive frill. We will defend our private world of assessment as a matter between our students and us, at most a matter to be shared with our colleagues. But that public world of external assessment seems beyond our reach, if-not our ken, and our instincts are always to withdraw, to claim professional privilege. Yet with so much at stake, no English faculty member can avoid involvement in assessment, although many of us would prefer to see our work in other terms. In yet another sense, writing assessment has become an important specialty

Explores the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. Searches to find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of the educational concerns and at the center of assessment models. Suggests that faculty should devote themselves to teaching the first-year course.

Notes that writing assessment has become an important specialty within composition studies with links to such “suspicious partners” as educational research, statistics, and politics and with profound effects on public policy and educational funding. Discusses the modern era of writing assessment beginning during the fall of 1971 an its implications. Considers assessment as a site of conflict.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

Contends that the academy has forgotten the origin of the dissertation and has turned it from a substantive contribution of scholarship to an instrument of evaluation. Argues that continuing to treat the dissertation in this way maintains an unequal power hierarchy of “masters” and initiates–it should be seen as the first serious scholarly monograph a scholar produces.

ot so long ago we attended a meeting of our department's graduate committee, the body that sets the policies and procedures of our large graduate program in English. The typically tedious deliberations were abruptly interrupted when a senior colleague, setting aside the matters being discussed, complained vociferously about a year-old policy on doctoral dissertations. The objectionable policy encouraged dissertation directors to counsel students to think of their dissertations as scholarly books rather than as mere academic exercises. Our colleague insisted that students should not conceive of their dissertations as books because a dissertation, he claimed, is the last important exercise that students will do in their graduate careers. This colleague, an accomplished scholar himself, argued passionately that most graduate students are not yet mature enough to contribute substantively to the types of conversations that professionals engage in, that they in effect need to prove themselves before being allowed to operate on the same plane as professionals. The perspective expressed by this colleague is far from atypical; in fact, it may well be the majority opinion of the graduate faculty in most English departments. This widespread understanding of the function and purpose of the dissertation derives from a kind of collective amnesia in the academy. As we will demonstrate, the academy has forgotten the origin of the dissertation and over the years has turned it from a substantive contribution to one's field to an instrument of evaluation. We argue that continuing to treat the dissertation in this way maintains an unequal power hierarchy of masters and initiates-one that is self-serving at best and unethical at worst. We argue further that it is incumbent upon those of us who direct dissertations to return to the practice of treating the dissertation as the first serious scholarly monograph a scholar produces. Such a practice is especially impor-

Advocates a position on the margins of English studies. Provides a general introduction to analytic philosophy of language. Elaborates Donald Davidson’s work on interpretation, which demonstrates why truth and rationality are inextricably linked to language and communication. Calls for reconfiguring the debate between and assessment of the disparate methodologies of English studies.

A belief shared by teachers of writing, one that we fervently try to inculcate in our students, is that revision can improve writing. This notion, that revision generally results in better text, often pairs up with another assumption, that revision occurs as we work through separate drafts. Thus, hand in your working drafts tomorrow and the final ones next Friday is a common assignment, as is the following bit of textbook advice: the draft is completed, a good critical reading should help the writer re-envision the essay and could very well lead to substantial rewriting (Axelrod and Cooper 10). This textbook advice, hardly atypical, is based on the rationale that gaining distance from a piece of discourse helps the writer to judge it more critically. As evidence for this assumption, Richard Beach's 1976 study of the self-evaluation strategies of revisers and nonrevisers demonstrated that extensive revisers were more capable of detaching themselves and gaining aesthetic distance from their writing than were nonrevisers. Nancy Sommers' later theoretical work on revision also sensitized us to students' need to re-see their texts rather than to view revision as an editing process at the limited level of word changes. A logical conclusion, then, is to train student writers to re-see and then redraft a piece of discourse. There are other compelling reasons for helping students view first or working drafts as fluid and not yet molded into final form. The opportunities for outside intervention, through teacher critiques and suggestions or peer evaluation sessions, can be valuable. And it is equally important to help students move beyond their limited approaches and limiting tendency to settle for whatever rolls out on paper the first time around. The novice view of a first draft as written-in-stone (or fast-drying cement) can preclude engaging more fully with the ideas being expressed. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there are advantages in being able, where it is appropriate, to master the art of one-draft writing. When students write essay exams or placement essays and when they go on to on-the-job writing where time doesn't permit multiple drafts, they need to produce first drafts which are also coherent,

Few will disagree, I think, if I say that twentieth-century discussion of the lyric has often granted little recognition, and sometimes none, to the role of argumentation. Indeed, the word itself may not appear at all: we are much more likely to be told, instead, that lyric poems contain-and we should emphasize the word contain--such things as subjects, ideas, themes, or even conceptual schemes, and we are just as likely to be told that none of these things are what the lyric is really all about. Such things belong to prose, and in the lyric are merely there, contained, as useful but dispensable accessories and props; the lyric dramatizes or expresses feeling. Or rather, it bodies forth image of the poet's thought as it moves through some phase or phases of an intensely felt experience (Hardy 1-2). It is essentially dramatistic or expressive, rather than, say, discursive, argumentative, or suasory-no matter how much, in the reader's experience, it may seem to operate discursively, as an argument intending to create, intensify, or change belief. The feeling's the thing. Or so that argument goes, or has gone. This is the average mainstreammodern view of lyric, the view most likely to be taken as a self-evident given in a typical account of this most protean mode of poetry. (Barbara Hardy, for example, is able to simply declare it, as an opening premise for her book, with virtually no recognition of a possible disagreement.) I believe that few will disagree, either, if I say that strong objections to this mainstream-modern version of the lyric are and have been available. We can argue, as did Yvor Winters, that lyric poetry, or any poetry, intends not only representation or embodiment of an or state of but also judgment or evaluation of human experience, and thus is necessarily suasory and involved with argumentation, or what Winters called exposition. Or we can argue, as Gerald Graff has done, that the logos and the pathos projected by a poem are necessarily related, as premise(s) and conclusion(s), what Graff calls ground and consequent: the ground provided by what is said, by logos, makes the speaker's represented state of feeling or act of mind both convincing and intelligible-as opposed, say, to self-indulgent, incoherent, and neurotic. Graff's line of objection, then, defines the lyric once more as a form of argument. We

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Over last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together learn and make meaning in discipline, and who have rejected philosophically kinds of approaches teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, problems for education in seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, growth in number of nontraditional learners in collegiate body, alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called question our obsession with major metaphor for learning over last three hundred years, the human mind as Mirror of Nature. As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible and also insists that we help our students through exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight (Liberal Education 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is a collaborative artifact (103) that results from intellectual negotiations (107). Bruffee explores curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on classroom and other on philosophical underpinnings of new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into issue of assessment generally as force in postsecondary

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The capacity to participate in verbally complex texts is not widely fostered in our educational system, and desirable habits of reflection, interpretation, and evaluation are not widespread. These are goals that should engender powerful reforms in language training and literary education. But none of these are attainable if good literary works of art are envisioned as the province of only a small, highly trained elite. Once the literary work is seen as part of the fabric of individual lives, the gap may be at least narrowed, without relinquishing recognition of standards of excellence.

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IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULT FOR ME to become enthusiastic about credit-by-testing programs. Perhaps because I've never done that well on standardized tests myself. Perhaps because I distrust the self-interest and power of credit-giving conglomerates. Perhaps because I see nationwide as a threat to my own job security (such as it is). Perhaps because testing, testing embodies the sort of dehumanized, regimental process that so much of literature warns against. So I admit that when I was initially appointed to be a Reader for the Advanced Placement Examination (APE) in English Composition and Literature, I had many reservations. However, at the time I remember advising myself to be realistic. The phenomenal success of credit-by-examination programs argued for their increasing influence on the direction of education in the future. I did not want forever to be accused of being out of step with the realities of our modern technological society. And so in 1978 I became a Reader of the free-response section of the APE. I have now been an APE Reader for three years, and, as I write, I have recently returned from the week-long summer grading at Rider College. What I am writing here is my own resignation from the process. APE is the child of the College Entrance Examination Board delivered by the Educational Testing Service. Although English is by far the largest, the AP examination is offered in thirteen fields. The sure growth of the program can be observed in the facts that in 1956, eighty readers scored 2,199 essay examinations, while in

PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nation's educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawson's distinction between

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IN IDoris Lessing and Romanticism, a long, dense, and carefully reasoned article, Michael Magie shares his disturbance over the effect that Lessing is likely have on her readers.1 Praising her realism and her clear-sighted analytical portraits (540), he criticizes her excessive scepticism about and rationality and her excessive generosity toward madness and mysticism. He feels that her work is likely have a bad influence on readers its urgings despair are based upon a faulty epistemology and a faulty ontology. And he concludes (in a statement about The Golden Notebook which I think he would apply most of her work since that novel was published in 1962) that, in Lessing, reason panders will, in that understanding conducts sympathetic approval rather than critical assessment (540). He fears that Lessing fosters moral obtuseness (547) and self-indulgence (552), that her intelligence is invested in an invitation stupidity (540). Magie is aware that many of the positions of which he disapproves are positions about which Lessing herself is skeptical. The Four-Gated City is such a long novel, he says, partly because of its author's resistance the ideas she was herself exploring there. . . . To say however that Doris Lessing thinks certain thoughts reluctantly is yet confess that she thinks (536), and from his point of view, that she thinks them is cause for us be wary. I suggest, however, that what is involved in thinking thoughts reluctantly is what many of Lessing's stories and novels are about. Undoubtedly, there is in her work a sense of urgency, a sense I find in perfect accord with the present facts and future probabilities, a sense that we live in dangerous times and may no longer have the time for leisurely movements toward truth, the switchbacks and the careful assessments. There is also (and for me this quality creates much of the tension and resonance in Lessing's work) a compassionate awareness of humankind's elaborate, protective devices, our ability to know something and then forget it2 again and again. In short, I cannot agree with Magie's assumptions about the reader implied or created by Lessing's works. When I ask myself what happens me when I read her, what happens of the particular engagements, the particular exercises of mind, which the books encourage or demand, I answer that, most of the time, I find myself alert, mentally active, and far from despair. I find her developing readers who can attend what they might otherwise disregard. I find her stimulating men-

IN The Bald Soprano Ionesco satirizes the grammar samples he studied while learning English, and many of us still remember some absurdly useless fragment, like How old is your aunt?, from a freshman foreign language class. But what about our own composition textbooks and tests? Humor, and opportunities to smile and share that pleasure with students, are welcome. But when I consider one of the findings of the second round of reading tests (1974-5) by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which demonstrated a decline in students' ability to detect irony, I wonder whether some of our grammar samples may not be suggesting unsuitable messages, to say the least, to students who are disposed, or decide, to read them literally. Such a discomfiting possibility occurred to me recently when a group of freshman composition students balked at doing this sentence combining exercise:

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