Models of Competence: Responses to a Scenario Writing Assignment.

TLDR: In this paper, a scenario assignment which opera- tionalized the theoretical premises of Rogerian rhetoric was administered to three groups of writers: graduate students trained to teach rhetoric, academically successful undergraduate students trained as tutors, and entering freshmen.

Abstract: Writers and teachers interpret scenario assignments from dif- fering perspectives on the writing situation. These interpretations im- ply differing models of communicative competence. Mismatches be- tween writers* and teachers' models of competence represent potentially problematic areas in the writer-teacher relationship. In order to discover disparities between writers' and teachers' inter- pretations of an assignment, a scenario assignment which opera- tionalized the theoretical premises of Rogerian rhetoric was admin- istered to three groups of writers: graduate students trained to teach rhetoric, academically successful undergraduate students trained as tutors, and entering freshmen. Analysis revealed the writers' diver- gences from the orthodox Rogerian interpretation of the assignment. The mean degree of adherence to the orthodox interpretation (here termed "interpretive community") was highest for the most experienced writ- ers. The correlation between interpretive community score and holis- tic score increased with the experience of the groups and was signifi- cant for the three groups combined. The analytical technique provided a heuristic for investigating models of competence implicit in essays as well as for estimating the nature and degree of agreement between writer and teacher on the interpretation of an assignment.