Abstract

Houlette argues that the poor correlation of syntactic measures with holistic scores may not mean that syntactic measures are invalid criteria (he cites Faigley, 1980, “Names”). Rather it is possible that holistic scoring is inaccurate. Houlette reasonably argues that “Instead of questioning the ability of the variables to correlate with grades, [Faigley] could have questioned the ability of grades to correlate with variables” (p. 111). Houlette reports the findings from his dissertation [completed in 1982 at the University of Louisville; see Houlette, 1982] that given-new measures and words per sentence explain twenty-three percent of variance in paper grades: “What this study tells researchers in composition who adhere to humanistic methodologies is that the assumption of the validity of reliably assigned holistic scores is a dangerous assumption. It would seem that such scores can at some times be more valid than at other times. What this study tells researchers who follow the empirical tradition is that they need more fully to explore the relationships between holistic scores and external criteria” (p. 112). [Of course, that relationship had been already explored by many researchers; e.g., Slotnik, 1974; Thompson, 1976; Nold and Freeman, 1977; Howerton, Jackson, and Selden, 1977; Breland and Gaynor, 1979.] Houlette calls for “cross-training researchers” in both humanistic and empirical methodologies (p. 112). RHH [Rich Haswell & Norbert Elliot, Holistic Scoring of Written Discourse to 1985, WPA-CompPile Research Bibliographies, No. 27]