Abstract

Why should writing centers embrace rather than simply comply with external mandates for assessment? As all of us know, writing center directors are already overwhelmed with duties, and any free time needs to be spent on improving our services and training our tutors, not facing the "math anxiety" brought about by collecting and analyzing assessment data. Even more important, many of us may equate externally mandated assessment with external accountability to conservative institutions not particularly supportive of our process-based pedagogy. My purposes are to argue that writing centers should move beyond mere compliance with externally mandated assessment and to describe a very general plan for beginning to expand our assessment efforts. To fulfill our daily responsibilities, writing center directors spend most of our time being concerned about the services offered in our centers -from tutoring students ourselves, to handling complaints from faculty members or students, to training tutors. Routine assessment allows us to move beyond our daily concerns so that we can consider our services from a more global perspective and better plan improvements or justify what is currently done.

Journal
Writing Center Journal
Published
2006
DOI
10.7771/2832-9414.1592
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