At my current institution, I am ashamed to say I am not really sure how we decided the Outcomes for Developmental and First-Year English. First-Year English is part of the General Education Curriculum and each of the core competencies is evaluated on a rotating basis, but how we established what is or is not covered in each course, was set long before I arrived and I have not asked how we came to the established outcomes. I think I'm like many teachers -- I use the master syllabus and make sure I am meeting the course and program outcomes established by my department/division.
When I was at SUNY Plattsburgh I was much more involved in understanding and contributing to that process. SUNY has system-wide standards for the core competencies including writing, and the colleges and universities regularly rotate through evaluating each of the core competencies by applying university-wide rubrics to student samples. The recently revised expectations for writing are posted openly at
http://www.suny.edu/provost/academic_affairs/SUNYWritingRubric.cfm
and meld the original charge established by the SUNY Council on Writing (which really initiated not just state-wide but national conversations about the assessment of English), CCCC, and WPA.
Although SUNY is a bureaucratic system, I do appreciate that every college and university is represented on the SUNY Council on Writing (lovingly abbreviated to SUNY COW). Finding a way for all colleges to be represented in a national conversation would be unrealistic, but a representative from each state or each state-wide school/system might work. Perhaps it would be most realistic to take advantage of a conference forum, like CCCC's, to have a working group draft a set of standards or a plan to share what we already have established through WPA and CCCC's with our home institutions and the vested parties. Or we could use something that has regional organizations, like NADE or CRLA, to have a forum for individual regions to talk about assessment and outcomes. May be we need one online digitial repository (I know WPA has collected several samples and their own statements) for writing outcomes?
Many of us who are program administrators or who have been involved in the development of outcomes or assessment projects know about state, regional, and national documents. We know about our fields established and accepted suggested outcomes, but I am not sure that others, including our colleagues in the field, are aware of these resouces. And all the documents we rely on as guides are not easily or readily accessed in one clearinghouse of information.
And the last thing I will say is that having taught both Developmental English and First-Year English, the two are different. I do love the WPA document, but we are talking about students are who not yet ready for a class or two-class sequence that would meet those outcomes. If our current conversation is on Developmental English, we need to think about where we would find and house recommendations for a national standard or reference on outcomes for Developmental English.
Nichole