Please note that as I have had no professional incentive to keep my CV current this document may be out of date or incomplete.
I hold a BA in English and philosophy from Central Connecticut State, an MA in Writing & Rhetoric from the University of Rhode Island, and a PhD in English from Purdue University. At Purdue I focused on assessment of student learning, particularly on writing assessment and education policy related to assessment. My dissertation was about the CLA+, a test that measures college learning, and the social and economic conditions that were (at the time) putting pressure on colleges to assess. I have also served as a peer reviewer for the academic journal Language Testing. In 2016, the New America Foundation contracted me to write a policy paper on the then-burgeoning field of standardized assessments of college learning. I have presented on assessment issues at several major conferences, and in 2023 I delivered the keynote address at the National Test Prep Association conference.
At Purdue I worked in the Oral English Proficiency Program, participating in developing and rating for the Oral English Proficiency Test, a proprietary assessment of spoken English for speakers of other languages. In the last year of my PhD studies I served as the assessment coordinator of the Introductory Composition at Purdue program, where I developed and implemented an essay-rating assessment system, including creating prompts and rubrics, training raters, and collecting and analyzing data. Relevant coursework from grad school includes classes in frequentist statistics and multivariate analysis, experimental design, quantitative research design for language testing, qualitative research design for education research, empirical methods for composition research, writing assessment, curriculum design for second language pedagogy, and an independent study in empirical research in writing pedagogy.
For four years I served as the Assessment Manager at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York, where I was in charge of assessing student learning, helping faculty to develop assessment systems for their departments and collecting and presenting college-level performance data. In that capacity I developed dozens of in-house assessment systems, collected, analyzed, and presented data on student performance, and evaluated a half-dozen of the leading higher education assessment software packages for potential licensing at the college. (Don’t do it, you can get all of that done with other tools.) I have taught more than a dozen sections of freshman composition, classes in oral English skills for graduate students, a course in public writing, and dissertation workshops for doctoral students. I worked for 18 months in a public school district, primarily as a paraprofessional in a program for students with severe emotional disturbance and as a long-term sub in middle school social studies. I also did test prep of various kinds for four years.
Selected Academic Writing
Standardized assessments must account for non-standardized institutions, for eCampusNews
Standardized Tests of College Learning: Past and Future, for the New America Foundation
Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, where I served as Comm Editor
“Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity” for System
My review of Class Dismissed for Teacher-Scholar
My CCCC panel review for Kairos
“The First Person” for Writing Commons
“Singular ‘Their’ and the Grammar Wars”
“Review of Mary Soliday’s Everyday Genres”
“Eugene Debs’s Statement to the Court: A Rhetorical Analysis”
“Postmodernism in Rhetoric and Composition: Past, Passing, and Yet to Come”