ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, when I was a special lecturer at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), teaching four sections of our undergraduate service course, I was invited to Princeton, New Jersey, to take part in a focus group of technical writing instructors. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) gathered teachers to review its Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) Subject Standardized Test of Technical Writing. These tests were administered to those in the armed forces and civilians, who could, with a passing score, then apply for college credit. The test content, although based on the topics commonly taught in the classroom, was operationalized through multiple-choice questions and sentence-correction items. We were asked, for example, if the content in a question set about the genre of instruction represented material we taught in our courses. Of course, we taught instruction writing in our courses, but I created interactive modules with Tinkertoys rather than a multiple-choice test item that asked students to identify imperative voice as the correct distinguishing characteristic of the genre. I was conflicted by my view of pedagogy, grounded
in the theories of learning advanced by Kenneth Bruffee (1984, 1986), who wrote persuasively about the social construction of knowledge and collaborative learning, and the prevailing paradigm of multiple-choice tests to assess knowl - edge of technical writing. My conflict mirrored the larger debates going on in mainstream writing assessment and in theories of technical writing. In 1989, Egon G. Guba and Yvonne S. Lincoln challenged the scientific paradigm of inquiry that standardized tests represented and offered a revolutionary constructivist approach that seems strikingly contemporary in hindsight. They urged a sociopolitical process that involved collaboration and consensual values for evaluation, localization for individual contexts, and a Socratic dialogue in which stakeholders both teach and learn from the assessment. Led by Carolyn Miller and her landmark article (1979), technical communication theory was also emerging from its 1970s positivist epistemology, in which technical communication was perceived as a tool for transmitting knowledge from one mind to another in clear, objective, and neutral language. In constructing a brief history of writing assessment in the introduction of Assessment in Technical and Professional Communication, Allen (2010) recounted the struggle of social constructivism during the late 1980s and across the 1990s to become the key element in authentic practice of teaching and assessing writing.
