We report on a college-level study of student reflection and instructor prompts using scoring and corpus analysis methods. We collected 340 student reflections and 24 faculty prompts. Reflections were scored using trait and holistic scoring and then reflections and faculty prompts were analyzed using Natural Language Processing to identify linguistic features of high, middle, and low scoring reflections. The data sets were then connected to determine if there was a relationship between faculty prompts and scores. Additional analysis was completed to determine if there was a relationship between scores and students’ GPAs. The corpus linguistics analysis showed that higher-scoring reflections used words that referred to the self, the writing process, and specific rhetorical terms. Additional analysis showed student GPAs did not correlate with holistic scores but that higher scoring reflections were from faculty who included learning goals on reflective writing prompts. Results suggest that teachers can de-mystify reflective writing by linking learning outcomes to textual tasks and that corpus linguistics methods can provide an understanding of how local learning goals are transmitted to students.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

While Writing Studies scholars have embraced research on multilingualism, writing scholars have not developed program assessment methods that are informed by that scholarship. This profile describes a program assessment design that was informed by research on multilingualism, super-diversity, and consequential validity. This design included student survey data, student interviews, scoring data, and institutional data with specific attention to language and mobility. Such a design allowed us to capture multiple sources of evidence to make valid inferences about the writing of a complex population. Moreover, the bottom-up collaborative process used in this assessment design echoed the program’s deep-rooted commitment to social justice in ongoing program research.

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.

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.

Diversity in writing assessment research means paying attention to the consequences of writing assessment for all students’ learning and writing. This special issue of Research in the Teaching of English brings together researchers from various national contexts who share such a perspective to explore the meanings and roles of writing assessment today.

Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and race productively.

Since 2006 the ‘Antwerp Group’ group has explored student writing from various country perspectives to understand what practices and pedagogies are country specific and what issues cut across national borders. The insights of the Antwerp Group helped inform a 2009–2010 collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in which we combined Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and English as Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. This paper describes how a theoretical model used by the Antwerp Group helped us identify the multivocality that each collaborating group brought to this new partnership. In the end, theorizing multivocality helped us recognize our diverse perspectives as a resource even as we sought to find a collaborative voice in setting project goals, defining a student survey, and implementing a curricular design for a WAC-EFL writing course.

This article describes a beginning research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two Mexican universities, the Universidad de Quintana Roo (UQROO) and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, that has developed and implemented an environment merging the pedagogies of English as a foreign language (EFL) and writing across the curriculum (WAC). The article presents a theoretical background for this partnership based on the research on globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) and then focuses on the early stages of the project as the research teams define their objectives, research methods, and teaching approaches.