Journal of Writing Assessment

Special Issue on Neurodivergence & Disability in Writing Assessment

• Editors’ Introduction: Focusing Attention on Disability and Neurodivergence

  • Tinoco, Lizbett;
  • Wittstock, Stacy;
  • Gomes, Mathew

  This editors’ introduction to the Special Issue (SI) on Neurodivergence and Disability in Writing Assessment identifies the urgency of attention to intersections between writing assessment research and neurodivergence, disability, and embodiment. The editors situate the SI within a longer tradition at JWA. 

• Introduction, JWA Special Issue on Disability, Neurodivergence, and Writing Assessment 

  • Harnish, Andrew;
  • Von Bergen, Megan

  This essay provides an introduction to the special issue on alternative writing assessment and disability/neurodivergence. The editors argue that anti-ableist theories of writing assessment are rooted in disciplinary efforts to address prior discrimination in writing assessment and subsequent work seeking to cultivate fairer, student-centered practices in both classroom and institutional spaces. Building on the work of scholars in disability studies and writing assessment, as well as the contributors to this special issue, the editors further contend that the diversity of experiences with disability/neurodivergence means that frameworks for anti-ableist writing assessment must be multivocal and plural, integrating values from disability studies, including the importance of foregrounding disabled experiences and acknowledging varied timeframes and methods for work and writing. The essay provides an overview of the contributors’ essays and concludes with an encouragement to readers to incorporate these articles into their research, teaching, and programmatic activities. 

• Decoupling Documentation From Disability: A First Step Toward Centering Neurodivergent and Disabled Writers in Writing Assessment Practices

  • Carillo, Ellen C.

  This article outlines a series of inclusive assessment practices to help mitigate the shortcomings of the academic accommodations system and support students with both documented and undocumented disabilities, as well as their non-disabled peers. I argue that because of the inequities that characterize the accommodations system, including the barriers that prevent students from gaining accommodations, faculty members across the disciplines should develop inclusive assessment practices so that students do not have to depend solely on the formal accommodations system. The inclusive assessment practices detailed in the article provide students with autonomy, choice, and flexibility. As such, these assessment practices already have the potential to meet the needs of students with a range of disabilities and particularly those with disabilities that have been termed “invisible,” such as learning disabilities, ADHD, psychiatric disabilities, and neurodivergence. I contend that because Writing Program Administrators have relationships with faculty across the disciplines they are well-positioned to guide faculty in rebuilding their assessment practices. The article concludes by considering how these inclusive assessment practices may potentially enhance recruitment and retention efforts, as well.  

• The Paradox of Academic Trust and Accessibility

  • Raines, Daniel

  This interlude examines the paradoxical nature of trust and accessibility in academic spaces through the author's dual perspective as both an AuDHD PhD student and Teaching Fellow. Through autotheoretical reflection on a particularly challenging semester complicated by medication side effects and anxiety, the author explores how institutional power dynamics create an uneven landscape of trust: while tenured professors can extend implicit trust to struggling students, precarious teaching fellows often feel constrained by institutional pressures and mentorship that emphasizes skepticism over accommodation. This tension reveals how institutional structures of distrust can impede the implementation of disability-conscious pedagogies, even when individual instructors are committed to accessibility.

• Metis as a Pedagogical Framework for Approaching Alternative Writing Assessment: Embracing Neurodiversity Through Adaptation

  • Hizer, Millie

  In recent years, metis, which refers to “the rhetorical concept of cunning and adaptive intelligence” (Dolmage, 2014, p. 5) has been utilized as a framework for theorizing approaches to writing anxiety (Wood, 2020), examining adaptive literacy practices (Kamperman, 2020), and reimagining pedagogy in the rhetoric and writing classroom (Selznick, 2020). While this scholarship has done critical work positioning metis as a framework for challenging normative approaches to writing pedagogy, little has been written to tie this concept to alternative writing assessment itself. In this article, I offer metis as a pedagogical framework for conceptualizing accessible alternative writing assessment practices grounded in adaptation. I argue that using metis as a framework encourages writing teachers to embrace neurodiversity through flexible writing assessment tactics that center students’ nonnormative, embodied composition processes.

  • 1 supplemental ZIP

• Beyond Retrofitting: Crip Engagement, Radical Flexibility, and Alternative Futures for Writing Assessment

  • Hawkins, Kelsey

  This article explores the limitations of current writing assessment models through a crip lens, critiquing the ableist assumptions embedded in traditional and alternative systems, such as labor-based and engagement-based grading. Drawing on Inoue’s (2024) concept of crip labor and the author’s own Engagement-Based Grading Contract (EBGC), the article examines how these models, while attempting to increase equity, still operate within the ableist structures of higher education. The author argues that true equity in assessment requires radical transformation, centered on the dynamic, diverse, and often unpredictable ways students engage with learning. The article introduces a crip assessment ecology that values radical flexibility, relationality, and disclosure, emphasizing the importance of embracing the varying forms of engagement that emerge in the classroom. By engaging with critical disability theory and praxis, this article advocates for rethinking assessment as a process that disrupts normative ideals and promotes inclusive, accessible, and transformative educational practices.

• Cripping Institutional Assessment: A New Writing Program Administrator’s Examination of Institutional Practices for Placement

  • Mitchell, Angela

  As a new Writing Program Director at a large R1 institution, my research focuses on ways to understand the challenges for disabled and neurodivergent students in our institutional writing placement. Since placement policies are often impacted by both internal and external factors over time, it may be hard for well-established institutional leaders to see the consequences of some of the administrative policies in our program. To that end, I hope this research is the beginning of enacting best practice disability policies at my institution in order to facilitate access, belonging, and equity in high stakes writing placement. Since all writing programs must align their curricular, pedagogical, and administrative purposes with institutional directives, I will also consider what can and cannot be easily changed and provide concrete and varied suggestions that may transfer across different institutions. My long-term goal is to move our program and our institution towards Margaret Price’s (2024) “collective accountability” (p.169). We need accountability that arises from a fundamental concern about the varying needs of the diverse students who come to our campus. I seek to explore a new framework for differently-abled students to navigate placement and that may help us adapt our institutional practices for assessment in ethical and sustainable ways.
  
  

   

• Disability, Normativity, and the Agentive Promises of Placement

  • Wood, Tara

  This article draws on critical disability frameworks to advance conversations on equitable placement design for writing programs in the postsecondary setting. The advantages of disability-as-insight are articulated, followed by a review of existing research on disability and directed-self-placement. Finally, a heuristic informed by critical disability studies is offered to administrators to apply to placement practices in their programs. The heuristic identifies four areas for interrogation: normativity, difference fixation, ableist influence, and crip futurities. The aim of the article is to mark the presence of critical disability studies in the existing scholarship on placement and to promote analytic tools that demonstrate the methodological utility of critical disability studies in promoting social justice and ethical placement practice. 

  • 1 supplemental ZIP

• Not That We Asked: Assessment, Placement, and Unprompted Disability Disclosure

  • Vidali, Amy

  Scholarship on disability and writing assessment has infrequently included discussion of writing placement. This is surprising, as placement is an assessment mechanism–whether students assess their own writing readiness or are assessed by others–and there is much scholarship on disability and writing assessment (including this special issue).

  Assessment of writing placement systems often focuses on how specific types of students succeed in the courses they eventually take, and to date, this research has not considered disabled students. While there may be challenges in gathering placement data on disabled students–as disability is often an ignored demographic in institutional data sets–the exclusion of disability in assessing placement systems is unjustified.

  At the same time, attending to disability in assessing writing placement systems should not be limited to assessing disabled students’ successes and failures. Rather than studying the outcomes for disabled students (which are limited by confounding variables), I suggest we flip the script and assess the inclusivity and accessibility of our placement systems, and by extension our writing programs and courses, by considering the presence of disability in our placement data. Assessing how and whether disability appears in writing placement data can be a starting point for writing programs looking to begin or extend conversations about disability and writing placement.

  To this end, I analyze a small set of disability disclosures in the reflective writing included as part of the 2024 Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process at my institution. I suggest that there is particular value in considering unprompted disclosures of disability in placement data, as such mentions reveal how and whether students perceive disability to be broadly relevant and welcome in writing programs and classrooms (even when it is not asked about). Examining these explicit and implicit mentions of disability in DSP data also urged me to consider how to more intentionally represent, and ask about, disability in writing placement surveys, which I consider in the final section of this essay. In all, this short essay invites more scholarship at the intersection of assessment, placement, and disability.

• Following the North Star: Movement Toward Universal Writing Assessment

  • Neal, Michael

  Pursuing universal writing assessments is a paradox. Universal writing assessments need to be designed for all students, and yet there is no one-size-fits-all method or practice that will work equally for all students. Therefore, universal writing assessment requires flexibility and the acknowledgement of difference. Universal writing assessment means that students won’t necessarily be doing the same things and being evaluated in the same ways, which is steeped into foundational notions of fairness, ranking, and comparison in assessment. Educators have also been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that our current approaches are sufficiently inclusive, but that is not the case. We still adopt ableist or accommodationist approaches to writing assessment even when we know universal writing assessment would be better for all involved. The extent to which universal writing assessment is possible will be largely dependent on local contexts and situations. In many ways it’s an impossibility, and yet one worth pursuing.