Placement
Determining the writing course(s) most appropriate for new students necessitates weighing the values and needs of a given writing program, institution, and the students they enroll (Royer and Giles). The aim of such decisions is to organize and place incoming students by relatively predictable levels of writing competence so as to enable faculty to teach students who are “reasonably homogeneous in their backgrounds and abilities” (Royer and Giles 23).
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For traditionally-aged students, this is a fairly realistic goal. Writing program administrators (hereafter referred to as WPAs) can safely assume that the majority of incoming traditionally-aged students are 18-24 years-old and have undergone similar K-12 educational experiences and developmental milestones. These consistencies, in turn, enable WPAs to anticipate the kinds of writing competencies incoming students already possess, as well as those they have yet to cultivate. WPAs can likewise predict, at least to some extent, traditionally-aged students’ orientations to learning given the relative coherence of their educational and developmental experiences. For example, traditionally-aged students are likely used to K-12 educators dictating what is necessary for them to learn, much of which includes standardized curricula intended to prepare them for nationally standardized tests (e.g., the ACT and SAT). In addition, these students have probably begun contemplating what it would be like to live independently only recently, having been largely reliant on older adults to determine such things as where they live, what they can afford, and what they are allowed to do. Such insights gleaned from the relative homogeneity in these students’ ages and corresponding educational and developmental experiences thus enable WPAs to predict and develop courses tailored to incoming traditionally-aged students’ writing competencies and learning needs.
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This iterative process is not nearly as straightforward when accounting for adult learners, however. Their ages, educational backgrounds, life experiences, and current circumstances are typically much more heterogeneous than their traditionally-aged counterparts, rendering them largely incompatible with the goal of placement to sort students into reasonably homogeneous groupings of writing ability.
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Adult learners’ educational backgrounds and life experience in particular can pose significant challenges for WPAs as they endeavor to predict incoming students’ writing proficiency. For example, there may be decades separating adult learners’ K-12 schooling from that of traditionally-aged students, making it highly probable that what and how any given adult learner was taught varies tremendously from not only their traditionally-aged peers but also other adult students. Additionally, adult learners likely possess a breadth of professional writing experiences that are unique and specific to certain occupations, which only further compounds the challenge of placement accounting for and reflecting the full scope of incoming students’ writing competencies. Finally, these students may have already completed several college courses from a variety of different postsecondary institutions, particularly community colleges and for-profit institutions (see Adult Learner Basics and Transfer Articulation). The extent to which WPAs can predict and develop curricula that correspond with the full range of adult learners’ educational backgrounds, life experiences, and resultant writing abilities for the purposes of placement is therefore limited.
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Still, this is not to say that efforts cannot be made to better account for adult learners in the placement process. Indeed, perhaps the best way WPAs can serve incoming adult students given their abundant heterogeneity is to approach placement with the recognition that flexibility, rather than a one-size-fits all placement process, is necessary in order to adequately assess and account for incoming adult learners’ writing proficiencies. Offering multiple measures for placement is therefore highly recommended (TYCA Research Committee). The sections that follow thus summarize the most common methods of placement as they pertain to adult learners specifically.
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Placement for Adult Learners
According to Royer and Gilles, “there is no essentially correct placement: there is only a placement that works out for students and teachers or doesn’t work out for students and teachers” (32). Placement is therefore context-dependent, shaped by all those involved – administrators, faculty, and students. A WPA’s fundamental task is to account for the sometimes competing needs and demands of these various parties in determining placement processes and decisions. While there is no essentially correct placement method, therefore, there are placement methods that privilege some groups over others. Indeed, if the traditional marginalization of adult learners in higher education is any indication (Bash; Churchill; Colvin; Gulley; Knowles; "Closing Gaps in Tennessee"), placement of adult students within writing programs likely favors the wants and needs of all but adult learners themselves. It is for this reason that the discussion that follows focuses almost exclusively upon adult learners and the ways in which the placement methods most often utilized for this population – standardized tests, directed self-placement, and prior learning assessment – can positively or negatively impact them.
Standardized Tests
Out of all the placement methods available to WPAs, perhaps the least popular among WPAs and arguably most problematic are standardized tests. Offered in a variety of forms, from multiple-choice questions (as is the case for the SAT Verbal and ACT English exams), human-scored essays (which is the format of the SAT Writing and ACT Plus tests), or computer-scored essays (such as the ACCUPLACER and COMPASS exams), standardized tests offer WPAs and institutional administrators a cost-efficient and somewhat reliable measure of incoming students’ writing ability (Royer and Gilles). They have been criticized, however, for their rather narrow focus on mechanical correctness (TYCA Research Committee), as well as their failure to account for the abundant variation in both student and writing program characteristics (Royer and Gilles; TYCA Research Committee). This is because such tests “offer little flexibility in terms of evaluation criteria or scoring mechanisms: they cannot be adapted to local curricula or student populations beyond crude adjustments” (TYCA Research Committee 139). Standardized tests, in other words, disregard the student altogether, which can and does result in misplacement, oftentimes into developmental English courses that do not count towards students’ degree requirements (TYCA Research Committee).
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Nevertheless, the use of standardized tests to place adult learners is often the only recourse available to WPAs, particularly at two-year institutions, where “open enrollment and walk-in advising . . . make placement assessment a continual, year-round process, effectively prohibiting the use of placement processes like entrance portfolios” (Lewiecki-Wilson et al. 165). This is particularly troublesome given that adult learners enroll at two-year institutions more so than they do four-year colleges and universities (“Characteristics of Postsecondary Students”). However, there may be relatively low-cost and minimally time-consuming placement methods that can supplement standardized tests. The Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) Research Committee, for example, recommends that WPAs implement multiple measures of placement in addition to standardized tests, such as most recent GPA, data obtained via a Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), college transcripts (if available), and writing samples. In so doing, WPAs offer adult learners a variety of ways to demonstrate readiness for college-level writing coursework, and WPAs in turn are better able to account for and capture adult learners’ heterogeneous backgrounds and writing competencies.
Directed Self-Placement
Unlike standardized tests, which place adult learners at the mercy of predetermined assessment criteria that essentially treat all students the same, directed self-placement empowers students by enabling them to make their own placement decisions. WPAs serve an advisory role for incoming students, communicating curricular differences between departmental writing courses, which students then use to place themselves into the course(s) they believe best matches their current writing abilities. Much like standardized tests, or any other placement method for that matter, this process might also include supplementary measures, such as a diagnostic essay or questionnaire, that faculty can use to relay placement recommendations to students (Balay and Nelson; Lewiecki-Wilson et al.). Consequently, directed self-placement can be thought of as a dialogic exchange between incoming students, WPAs, and writing faculty, in which all those involved collectively negotiate placement decisions.
Ultimately, however, students are free to place themselves as they see fit, regardless of WPA and faculty counsel. The implicit assumption underlying directed self-placement is thus that “students know more about their own writing than either standardized tests or experienced readers would” (Balay and Nelson 3). This effectively circumvents WPAs’ dilemma of having to capture and account for adult learners’ vast heterogeneity in the placement process; however, adult students, particularly those who have been out of school for a significant period of time, may lack the necessary contextual insight to make an appropriate placement choice. This is because what any given student knows about their writing ability is relative to their own experiences (Balay and Nelson), particularly those that are recent, which may or may not include experiences with college-level academic writing. And while this poses challenges for even traditionally-aged students in terms of placement, adult learners in particular are likely to have a wealth of personal, professional, and even academic writing experiences quite unlike that of their traditionally-aged peers and certainly unlike what is expected of them in college writing courses. The extent to which they can successfully place themselves, therefore, is questionable. Indeed, WPAs at one four-year institution found that directed self-placement did not predict student success in terms of course grades as well as standardized test scores did (Balay and Nelson). Moreover, larger institutions with limited resources and advising infrastructures may find directed self-placement too time-consuming and inefficient given the ample number of incoming students that must be placed (TYCA Research Committee).
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Directed self-placement is not without its advantages, however. With an emphasis on student agency, this placement method enables adult learners to draw from their experiences and assume responsibility for their learning, both of which are central tenets of Malcolm Knowles’ adult learning theory, andragogy (see Adult Learning Theory). In addition, directed self-placement may lend itself well to distance education, as students are typically free to complete diagnostic materials, review course descriptions, and correspond with advising faculty electronically. This is particularly significant for WPAs given that adult learners are more likely than traditionally-aged students to enroll in distance education programs and/or courses ("Characteristics of Postsecondary Students"). Finally, even institutions with limited resources and advising infrastructures may adopt a modified version of directed self-placement, wherein only a subset of students – such as those whose standardized test scores are the “least-predictive middle range” – are offered to place themselves (TYCA Research Committee 145). In spite of the aforementioned limitations, then, directed self-placement offers WPAs and adult learners a placement process that is 1) congruent with adult learning theory, 2) accommodating of adult learner enrollment trends, and 3) flexible.
Prior Learning Assessment
Of all the placement methods typically utilized for adult learners, prior learning assessment is without doubt the most responsive to adult students’ highly variable personal, professional, and educational backgrounds. Unlike standardized tests and directed self-placement, which often involve one placement measure and/or process that can then be supplemented with additional methods, prior learning assessment almost always involves multiple measures of writing competence in the first place. The most commonly used methods of prior learning assessment include some combination of 1) portfolio assessment; 2) evaluation of non-collegiate instructional programs and/or courses, including corporate and/or military training; 3) college and/or department-specific exams for individual courses; and 4) standardized tests (Klein-Collins and Hudson). This provides adult learners numerous ways to demonstrate their writing competence, and it likewise enables WPAs to better capture and account for adult learners’ largely heterogeneous life experiences and resultant writing abilities.
Prior Learning Assessment Methods
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Individualized student portfolios and portfolio assessments
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Evaluation of corporate and military training by the American Council on Education (ACE)
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Program evaluations done by individual colleges of non-collegiate instructional programs and/or courses
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Customized exams offered by individual colleges to verify learning achievement - these may be current course final exams or other tests developed at the departmental level for assessing general disciplinary knowledge or skill
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Standardized tests such as
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Advanced Placement (AP) exams
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College Level Examination Program (CLEP) exams
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Excelsior College exams
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DANTESS Subject Standardized Tests (DSST)
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Adapted from: Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. "Fueling the Race to Postsecondary Success: A 48-Institution Study of Prior Learning Assessment and Adult Student Outcomes." 2010, pp. 1-8.
Perhaps the most versatile of these methods is portfolio assessment, wherein students prepare multiple pieces of writing that can range from formal academic essays, to professional documents, to preliminary brainstorming and rough drafts. These documents are then read and assessed by WPAs and writing program faculty to determine students’ placement. Portfolio assessment thus offers WPAs the freedom to decide what kinds of writing incoming students can submit; however, it is in WPAs’ and adult learners’ best interests that students be permitted great latitude in what they can submit, as this enables adult learners more opportunities to demonstrate their writing proficiency given their unique educational backgrounds and life experiences. However, for writing programs that lack the necessary resources and infrastructure to help prepare and evaluate placement portfolios for all incoming students, there are more standardized options available. The Council of Adult and Experiential Learning, for instance, offers an online portfolio assessment service known as LearningCounts, in which students take either a self-paced or instructor-led portfolio development course to learn how to document their prior learning (Klein-Collins and Hudson). Trained faculty assessors then evaluate the portfolio and determine whether to make a formal college credit recommendation to the institution and/or program for a comparable college course (Klein-Collins and Hudson). The benefits of LearningCounts in particular are quite promising: “students with the highest level of engagement with LearningCounts – those who earned portfolio credits – had significantly better academic outcomes in terms of both degree completion and overall persistence than students with lower levels of engagement” (Klein-Collins and Hudson 2), as well as those who did not make use of LearningCounts (see Figures B and C).
Source: Klein-Collins, Rebecca and Sean Hudson. "What Happens When Learning Counts? Measuring the Benefits of Prior Learning Assessment for the Adult Learner — A CAEL Self-Study of the Academic Outcomes of LearningCounts Students." 2017, pp. 1-28.
Other methods of prior learning assessment, in addition to portfolios, have likewise proven useful. Having conducted the first major multi-institutional study on the relationship between prior learning assessment and student outcomes, the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) reported that students “had much higher degree-earning rates than non-PLA students. More than half (56%) of PLA students earned a postsecondary degree within seven years, while only 21 percent of non-PLA students did so” (Council for Adult and Experiential Education 3). Additionally, students who had earned prior learning assessment (PLA) credit were much more likely to persist than non-PLA students, and they likewise saved an average of 1.5 to 10 months of time earning their degrees compared to students who had not received PLA credit (Council for Adult and Experiential Education). Perhaps most importantly, the use of prior learning assessment enables adult learners to discover that even those experiences outside of academia may reflect college-level learning and writing proficiency.
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However, even with these benefits, certain writing programs may lack the funding to support even a standardized prior learning assessment service like LearningCounts. Moreover, portfolio assessment in particular necessitates no small amount of time on the student’s part to prepare numerous documents for review, meaning that it might be several weeks and/or months after a student has enrolled at college or university that they complete their portfolio, have it assessed, and receive a placement decision. WPAs must therefore weigh the logistical challenges of implementing prior learning assessment as a method of placement against its numerous advantages when determining placement processes. Still, given its flexibility and documented success, WPAs would do well to consider implementing prior learning assessment, or at least aspects of it, as part of their placement process.
