This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.

In this article, I present the results of a national study of response to student writing and argue for an approach to response I call Responding for Transfer (RFT). My corpus includes peer and teacher responses to 1,054 rough and final drafts of student writing from across the curriculum as well as 128 student self-reflection essays from ePortfolios at seventy institutions of higher education across the U.S. I present evidence from this corpus to support my argument for an RFT approach that emphasizes student self-assessment, focuses teacher response on student metacognition rather than the products of drafts, and takes response into consideration in the design of vertical transfer curriculum.

Reviews of: Very like a whale: The assessment of writing programs Edward M. White, Norbert Elliot, and Irvin Peckham (2015) ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-985-2. Pp. 202. Assessing and improving student writing in college Barbara E. Walvoord (2014) ISBN-13: 978-1-118-55736-5. Pp. xiii + 119.

Rebecca Nowacek (2011) observes that “scholarship on transfer in the field of rheto-ric and composition has understandably focused on first year composition: what knowledge and abilities transfer out of, and less commonly, into FYC ” (p. 99). There is consensus in this research that all too often students fail to transfer skills learned in their first-year composition courses to other writing contexts across the curric-ulum. There is also consensus that composition instructors wishing to encourage transfer should focus on metacognitive awareness of writing processes; understand-ing of key writing studies concepts like rhetorical situation, genre, and discourse community; and making explicit connections to students ’ future college and pro-fessional reading and writing tasks (Beaufort, 2007; Bergmann & Zepernick, 2007; Clark & Hernandez, 2011; Fishman & Reiff, 2008; Wardle, 2007). What scholars have focused less attention on is how these lessons learned from the research on transfer and first-year composition might inform the design not just of first-year composi-tion courses, but of university writing across the curriculum (WAC) efforts, from a student’s first year to his or her final semester. With the exception of Anne Beaufort (2007) and David Smit (2004), even researchers who have studied courses across disciplines have focused their advice not on the structural design of campus WAC programs, but on what individual instructors can do to encourage transfer (Caroll,

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.