William Condon

  1. Professor Emeritus
Email Addressbcondon@wsu.edu

Biography

Bill Condon is currently Professor of English at Washington State University. He has been a Writing Program Administrator at a wide variety of institutions—the University of Oklahoma, Arkansas Tech University, the University of Michigan, and Washington State University. He is the English Leader of a state-wide College Readiness Project, organized by Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board and Co-PI on a Spencer Foundation grant to trace the effects of faculty development into student learning outcomes. He was Principal Investigator of a three-year FIPSE grant devoted to faculty development and statewide accountability assessment around teaching critical thinking. Co-author of Writing the Information Superhighway and Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Theory, Practice, and Research, and Consulting Editor of Assessing Writing: An International Journal, Bill has also published articles in the areas of writing assessment (“Teaching and Assessing Writing: Common Ground,” in Composition Studies/Freshman English News 26 (Fall 1998): 83-96), program evaluation (“Accommodating Complexity: WAC Program Evaluation in the Age of Accountability,” in WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for/of Continuing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs, eds. Susan McLeod, Chris Thaiss, and Eric Miraglia, Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001), and computers and writing (“Why Less Is Not More: What We Lose by Letting a Computer Score Writing Samples,” in Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences, eds. Patricia Freitag Ericsson and Richard Haswell, Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2006).

Publications

  • Co-author of Writing the Information Superhighway (with Wayne Butler)
  • Co-author of Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Theory, Practice, and Research (with Liz Hamp-Lyons)
  • “Teaching and Assessing Writing: Common Ground.” Composition Studies/Freshman English News 26 (Fall 1998): 83-96.
  • “Accommodating Complexity: WAC Program Evaluation in the Age of Accountability.” WAC for the New Millennium: Strategies for/of Continuing Writing Across the Curriculum Programs, Eds. Susan McLeod, Chris Thaiss, and Eric Miraglia. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001.
  • “Online Learning Environments: Previewing the Online Agora.” Works and Days 17 & 18 (1999-2000), 487-498.

Teaching Interests

His current teaching interests include graduate seminars in writing assessment and in the theory and practice of teaching college composition; and undergraduate courses in which he can apply some of the innovative uses of assessment and computer-enhanced pedagogy that he has encountered over the years. His latest book, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, is Faculty Learning, Student Learning: Assessing the Connections, co-authored with Carol Rutz, Cathy Manduca, Ellen Iverson, and Gudrun Willett.

Research Interests

  • Writing Assessment
  • Composition Pedagogy
  • World Civilizations
  • 19th Century British Literature
  • Computers and Writing