Richard Haswell
Texas A & M University
Student opinion is like a gathering storm. Everybody can feel it but nobody does anything about it. Occasionally researchers send up instruments. Their recordings tend to get lost in the journals, it seems. Meanwhile, most of us just accept student opinion, breathe it in without thinking, like the air.
This seems especially true with state-mandated testing of writing. Most of the students we face in first-year writing classrooms have been through it. Currently almost all state public school systems must teach to state-wide mandated examinations in writing, often at several points in the student's career, often as a graduation requirement. But do we ever ask our students what they have been through? We don’t even talk about it much among ourselves. Five years ago I went through a two-day on-campus interview here at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, but it was not until six months later in the middle of the fall semester that I first heard of TAAS, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills program that exercises an astonishing influence on the teaching of writing in all Texas public schools. If teachers don’t talk about such examination programs, even less are they inclined to ask their students to talk about it.
There is a taboo operating here, some reluctance to know.
Every honest research effort to tap into student opinion that I have read has surprised me somewhere. Jennie Nelson got Carnegie-Mellon students to tell her how they handled writing assignments. Seven of the thirteen seriously misunderstood the assignment, and two out of the thirteen said they had just invented stuff, passed it off as data. Not fun to hear. Checking out the inside of students' heads is understandably scary: “Expect poison from standing water.” There's always the primitive fear that photographing the mind will steal the soul. “Bring out number, weight, and measure,” goes another of Blake’s proverbs of Hell, “in a year of dearth.”
Fall of 2001 was not a good season, as we all know, yet that was when my colleague Glenn Blalock and I decided to find out what our first-year writing students thought about the TAAS tests that most of them had passed (for the last time) two years earlier as sophomores in high school. We ended up with 402 responses that students said we could publish anonymously.
We didn’t get poison, nor a dearth. But some of what we got really surprised, even shocked me.
In this module, I’m asking you to sample some of this student opinion to hear what you make of it.
All 402 of the responses, unedited, are available on line at <http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/index.html>. The site also has an account of the prompt and enough background to understand where the students are coming from by way of TAAS preparation and TAAS examination in Texas public schools.
I won’t outline my surprise and shock now, waiting to hear your reactions. But I do have some leading questions to jump-start discussion, and maybe to provide some entry points into this archive of raw commentary. In O America, Luigi Barzini notes that the French have a saying about journalism, that it “mène á tout pourvu qu’on en sorte.” The material here doesn't lead to everything, but I think it does lead to some very important things, provided we can sort them out.
The numbers in these questions refer to individual responses in the archive.
1. How does the mandated-testing in Texas compare with the situation in your state? (You can check out your state's system at FairTest's website "Testing Our Children" <http://www.fairtest.org/states/survey.htm>)
2. The most common phrase of these students in reference to the TAAS testing is “waste of time” (e.g., No. 31, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS02.htm) Why isn’t their most common phrase "the test is unfair"?
3. Students often talk about having to “unlearn” what they were taught about writing for the TAAS tests (e.g., No. 212, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS11.htm). How does that notion of unlearning position us later as teachers of writing?
4. The way English teachers are portrayed is not flattering (e.g., No. 259, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS13.htm) Often teachers are seen as frantic under pressure or as lackeys of the system. What presuppositions about composition teachers do these students bring to college FYC classes, and what might we do about it?
5. Largely, students are not against academic testing but are against this particular kind of test, which they rightly size up (though they don’t have the term) as a minimum-essentials test (e.g., No. 275, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS14.htm) This particular sample of opinion, of course, comes from students who passed the TAAS and who have entered college. How would it be different if it came from students who failed the test or who were not college bound?
6. These students seem quite aware of what we would call the infrastructure of TAAS testing, the political and economic connections with testing firms, the allocation of state funds to school districts, the faculty reward systems, and so on (e.g., 032, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS02.htm) How are students going to transfer that understanding to our college writing programs?
7. No doubt it is my own bias, but I read many of the positive comments on TAAS as simplistic and maybe even brainwashed (e.g., No. 254, http://comppile.tamucc.edu/TAAS/responses/TAAS13.htm) Are there students who truly benefited from the preparation and the testing?
8. What happens when we don’t ask students about their testing experiences before they enter our classrooms? What message or mystification are we sending them? Are we mystifying ourselves?
9. How is this student-opinion from Texas relevant to your own teaching?
10. Finally, a question about the decision of Glenn and I to publish this material. We’ve taken advantage of cyberspace, of course, but we have also reversed the customary order of things. Typically, raw data are converted into research findings, and the findings are published first. Only at that point are interested parties offered access to the raw data, sometimes via an address in a footnote in small type. Instead we've made the archive of raw data available first, hoping that people will make something of it. (Walt Haney, at Boston University, who has done important research on TAAS, has a graduate assistant working with this archive already.) What do you see as potential dangers in our procedure?
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