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This descriptive case study examined how highly experienced raters do writing assessment, with a focus on how raters defined the task under two conditions: (1) as external raters and (2) as 'teacher as rater'. Three raters followed a think-aloud procedure as they evaluated student writing. The semantic structure of the think-aloud protocols was analyzed via the Task Independent Coding method. This analysis yielded a detailed representation of the objects and operations used by raters. The sequence which raters followed as they used these objects and operations was represented schematically by problem behavior graphs for each scoring decision made (N = 360). Analyses of the problem behavior graphs showed that raters defined the task in three very different ways: (1) by searching the rubric to make a match between their response to the text and the language of the scoring rubric (search task definition), (2) by assigning a score directly based on a quick general impression (simple recognition task definition), or (3) by analyzing the criteria prior to score assignment without considering alternative scores (complex recognition task definition). Raters differed in their use of task definitions when they evaluated the same texts. These results challenged current Writing assessment procedures which assume that raters Internalize a scoring rubric during training and make a direct match between the scoring rubric and text characteristics. In addition, these results indicated that task definition is related to individual characteristics of the rater rather than status as a rater (i.e., external rater or 'teacher as rater'). These findings are discussed in terms of the effect of different task definitions on the validity of writing assessment.

Photocopy of typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1980. / Bibliography: leaves 232-241. / Microfiche. / ix, 241 leaves, bound 28 cm

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Rhetoricians have long sought to improve our efforts and capacity to reason together, to achieve at the very least mutual understanding in the face of conflict and difference. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, for instance, Wayne Booth argues that the socalled rational-irrational split, in part, keeps us from doing this: achieving understanding of one another’s reasons. But despite this call to improve our rhetoric, there persists (especially in writing pedagogy) the sense that we must choose between reason and emotions like empathy. This dissertation explores whether empathic reasoning, an instance of the narrative imagination, helps us better understand, maybe even negotiate, conflicts of apparently incommensurable values. This dissertation argues that, by more fully considering, employing, and teaching empathic reasoning, we might usefully foreground (1) our apparent struggles sometimes to find common ground with others, especially our perceived adversaries; (2) the ways in which we structure our worlds through language, and omit from our world, through both language and force, “the other”; and (3) the subtle yet audacious ways in which we often fail to reason, equitably and charitably, with others. If, as many scholars in rhetoric argue, greater empathic reasoning is required to improve deliberation and public discourse, then what are the limits and possibilities of this form of reasoning? And what are the potential means by which we might model, cultivate, and improve our abilities to engage in, and analyze, this process of reasoning and moral inquiry? Finally, what does rhetorical instruction, practice, and theory offer by way of a means of cultivating these capacities for reasoned deliberation, reciprocation, and informed judgment? Throughout this project I explore some of these limits and possibilities of empathic reasoning; and in every chapter I come to the same basic conclusion. That despite the limits of empathic reasoning there is great need, still, for realizing and cultivating further its possibilities: for improving the ways we reason together, in part by expanding our capacities to imagine more fully -- charitably, responsibly, critically -- the contingencies that inform and the particulars that comprise our life stories, our interconnected narratives. / text

American composition classrooms focus on teaching students to be assertive, self-assured, and definitive. What they do not tend to emphasize is how to reach mutual understandings, especially when communication takes place across cultural borders. This dissertation explores interdisciplinary perspectives on intercultural communication and alternatives to argument to suggest possibilities for building a rhetoric that better enables understanding between cultures. In this text I challenge assumptions about culturally based rhetorical strategies, question the tendency to teach argumentative writing in American composition classes, propose rhetorical strategies for reaching mutual understanding across cultures, and show the positive feelings of contemporary university students toward nonargumentative writing assignments.This dissertation has two main aims. The first aim is to show that trying to manufacture a one-to-one correspondence between a culture and its communication strategy is not as straightforward as it may seem. Such efforts not only tend to essentialize the differences between cultures, but they also ignore the multiple strategies that people from all cultures use to deal with complex rhetorical situations. By analyzing press releases from both the United States and North Korea, I show that categorizing an entire culture's communication style under one label is a mistake. Instead, I show that in different situations both Americans and Koreans use a variety of rhetorical strategies in their communication. The second aim of this dissertation stems from the first. Once I have shown that people across cultures are both the same and different and that our use of language reflects this reality, I call for a change in our educational practices in order to better reflect these complexities. I show how teaching alternatives to traditional academic argumentation can better foster intercultural understanding by describing a research-based writing assignment I designed that asks students to explore controversial issues nonagumentatively. This assignment encourages students to explore the many facets involved in complex situations and avoid simplistic either-or thinking. In meeting this challenge, students often make use of collaborative writing and go beyond traditional text formats to create hybrid texts. Overwhelmingly they report positive reactions to such innovative writing strategies.

An approach commonly used to teach argument in English departments tacitly dichotomizes argument and persuasion, separates cognition from affection, and values the product over the ability to form concepts and to convey ideas with engagement. Yet contemporary texts like Annette Rottenberg's Elements of Argument indicate a growing concern that teaching argument as formal reasoning and excluding ethics and emotions fail "the complexity of arguments in practice" (v).This dissertation argues for a pedagogy of argument as "inquiry." While its intellectual roots trace to the Isocratean/Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, the interdisciplinary theories from which it draws all recognize the mind's power to create knowledge through the dialectic of the "knower" and the "known": the semiotic language theory of Peirce, the instrumental learning theory of Dewey, the legal theory of Holmes, and the composing theory of Berthoff.The current-traditionalist over-attention to form inhibits the natural composing process and constrains inquiry by ignoring social values and public opinion. In contrast, "jurisprudentialism" attends to the critical analysis and creation of argument by focusing upon a writer's active participation in the recursive process of exploration and justification. It operates by an informal logic in which the test of sound judgment is whether an audience of competent persons is willing to accept its truth.In exploring and justifying a jurisprudential pedagogy of argument, this study claims that the traditionalists' pedagogy of "right" writing in the modern academy traces to the elitist, positivist camp of Plato's academy. This pedagogy casts rhetoric as a medium of communication, not as a means of making knowledge. It employs "recipe" argument in which language is the "batter of thought." It comprises a "know-what" pedagogy that treats writers as "lesser souls, not as the "philosophers" that they can become if provided the "know-how."Additionally, the study shows how the Platonist and the Sophistic rhetorical traditions have emerged in modern education as current-traditionalism and jurisprudentialism. It traces the historical ties between law and rhetoric and the intellectual forces of science and philosophy that separated them, as well as those that are bringing them back together again. / Department of English

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