This special issue features articles that can help composition instructors think about ways to assess student products that are delivered in a variety of media. Although the topic of assessment is a common one, challenges arise as we apply—and adapt—our traditional assessment strategies to the features and components of compositions produced using new media. It is our hope that by engaging with the experiences of the authors of the articles in this special issue, readers of this issue will begin a conversation—among themselves, with their students—that leads them to articulate, reflect upon, and continually refine the criteria that are essential to both formative and summative assessment.

Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

This is the first book to provide a careful treatment of issues that underlie composition teaching, theory, and research.Lee Odell and his contributors believe that composition professionals in the classroom must approach their work with what Peter Elbow calls a theoretical stance. Teachers of writing need to take an active role in composing the theories that underlie efforts to teach their students to write. Behind everything that composition teachers do are fundamental assumptions about knowledge and the processes of teaching and learning, about the goals of education, and about the role of writing in people s lives.Odell s introduction examines the basic relationships between theory and practice. To explore specific sets of assumptions about knowledge, education, and writing, he has gathered together a group of major composition scholars, including Shirley Brice Heath, Jim W. Corder, and Anne J. Herrington. Although each author addresses a different issue, they all invite the reader to join them in the process of identifying and shaping the theories that make up the profession.

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