Dear colleagues,
With Christie Toth, Tiffany Buckingham Barney, Kris Messer, and Jason Godfrey, I am thrilled to share an announcement:
The Journal of Writing Analytics has just published our invited white paper, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Writing Placement, and Principled Decision Making in U.S. Postsecondary Contexts. Please find it here: https://doi.org/10.37514/JWA-J.2026.9.1.01
The exigency for the white paper was an institutional mandate for GAI to be used in writing placement—on a three-month timeline. This team came together to determine how some of our deepest-held values about writing pedagogy and writing assessment, interpersonal and human-machine relationships, and collaboration could be implemented in such a scenario.
The result is a comprehensive (though not exhaustive!) text outlining:
- The current context related to GAI and writing placement
- Six guiding principles for writing placement
- The current state of GAI writing assessment
- Evidence-centered design models to promote reflection, collaboration, and deliberative action
- Possible applications of GAI in writing placement
- Future plans
Our goal was to create something usable for colleagues across the country. We are grateful for the generous feedback from a dozen reviewers and support from The Journal of Writing Analytics. We invite you to dig in—and to offer feedback, which we will integrate into a 2.0 version released later this year (we will also incorporate student feedback in that version). You’ll find a feedback form in Section 6 of the white paper.
You can hear more about the white paper at TYCA National next week; please join us Wednesday, March 4, 2:10–3:00 pm in Room 26 B at the Huntington Convention Center.
Sincerely,
Jessica, on behalf of the team
Jessica Nastal, PhD
College of DuPage
Incoming co-editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College