Directed Self-Placement: Subconstructs and group differences at a US university

Directed Self-Placement (DSP) is an approach that brings together self-efficacy and course selection to guide enrollment of college students into first-year writing courses. The study in this article emerged in an institutional scenario in which the DSP process at a U.S. university changed from a reading and writing task with reflective questions to reflective questions only. In turn, the scenario provided an important opportunity for examining the impact of the presence of a constructed response task on students? answers to the same DSP reflective questions. The study especially examines whether the presence of a task influenced two sub-constructs in student selfassessments: their proficiency in academic, written English, and their autonomy, or their need for help from a professor to complete reading and writing tasks during their first year of college. The results show differences in the students? self-assessments of proficiency and autonomy based on whether or not they completed a task, but these differences were statistically significant only for certain student groups. The article closes by addressing implications, including the need for future research that investigates disaggregation and consequence for all students in support of fairness and justice in assessment design and use.