Teaching in the Aftermath of the Test: Understanding and Addressing Student Conceptions of Writing in the Era of High-Stakes Testing

In this study, I seek to understand and address the limited ways that students see writing as a result of being taught to write for high-stakes exams. Specifically, I use teacher research methodologies to explore the following questions: 1) How do students conceive of writing in the era of high-stakes testing?, and 2) How might we teach first-year writing in order to help students see writing more broadly than it is portrayed in these testing situations? First, I use interviews with my former first-year writing students to discover to what extent and in what ways writing instruction in K-12 is shaped by high-stakes tests. I present broad findings from coding these interviews as well as quotes directly from interviewees. Second, I use classroom-based inquiry to design and teach an online first-year writing class in which students perform inquiry into what writing is for them, in part by having them reflect on and contextualize their past experiences writing for exams and then research how writing overlaps with their own interests. I include my own course design and assignments as well as excerpts of student writing to demonstrate the successes of implementing this kind of reflexive, rhetoric-based, student-centered pedagogy in order to encourage students to think of writing more broadly. Using liminal theory, I argue that the first-year writing class is an appropriate place to help student re-see what writing is and can do, and this approach proves effective for addressing the limited ways students see writing and education in this era of high-stakes testing.