ACT recent survey/Barbara Cambridge's NCTE blog

Barbara Cambridge has blogged about this year's ACT National Curriculum Survey. As with the previous report, this one indicates that college writing instructors say hs classes should focus more on grammar and punctuation. Who are these college instructors, I ask? As I said in a response to Barbara's post, I was a respondent for the previous ACT survey. I found the questions maddeningly narrow and underscored by a conception of writing/learning that bore virtually no resemblence to one shared among those in the field of composition/rhetoric. I wrote my objections to the survey on the document; I have no doubt but that they were discarded. The most recent report, like the previous one, also refers to ACT's various curriculum and placement instruments as products that can help hs teachers "provide" what college teachers are represented as desiring, too. It's yet another example of the testing/curriculum industry's self-referencing, profit making research. Follow those footnotes, too ... I have no doubt but that they refer to other studies conducted by ACT and aligned organizations.

The next time this survey comes out, I'm going to suggest that everyone who receives it stage an action against it - that's the only way I can think of to catch ACT's attention and let them know that this is not the way that many college writing instructors approach/envision writing instruction. Gargh...