Writing Assessment Discussion

1. Writing Assessment Discussion February 3, 2010 Marcie Leek Christina Purdy JC Clapp Bradley Lane Jane Lister-Reis David Bucci Christopher Davis Jack Bautsch

3. Write a short essay addressing the following: Barack Obama recently became President of the United States. The cartoon can have many meanings. 1. What does the cartoon say to you? 2. Does it leave anything out? 3. Which classes that you have taken here at North help you to think about your answer? For your information: The words listed in this cartoon are the names of some important people and events in United States history.

4. Applying this rubric to these writings was hard. It was out of any context. I had no idea of the range of students I was dealing with.

5. The rubric was not designed to go with that assignment. They were created independently.

6. It also felt odd to be comparing students who were clearly learning English as a second language along with students who say they have taken English 102 and coordinated studies.

7. I understand that it is supposed to be asking as a college, “Are they coming out with these outcomes?’ That means you do have to have students across the entire range.

8. For me, I don’t know how useful it is to find we have an average of 2.0, which equates to “developing” on this rubric.

9. Yep. If you look across the campus you would probably agree most of our students are “developing”.

10. I agree. It was out of context, we didn’t know our audience, and we wonder, “Why are we doing this?”

11. I really liked our getting together. In our group we had English people and people who had not much experience gauging writing skills, so we had some respectfully combative meetings. It was exciting and fun.

12. Maybe because we didn’t create the assignment, it doesn’t help us much. It says to write an essay about these three things…

13. …which forces them to link them together in a way that they might not have done…

14. …if we had asked them to analyze this cartoon.

15. The wording in the boxes of the rubric led us in different directions. The word “expert” leads some to think a different way. We had a lot of comments about the rubric itself.

16. We thought that designing a rubric that goes with the assignment would be a better start for this inquiry.

17. We were expecting things out of the writing, based on the rubric, that I’m not sure the student, given the prompt, would know how to produce.

18. It says, “Write about this cartoon.” Typically, I give expectations: there needs to be paragraphs; it needs to be organized in a way that makes sense.

19. Without those expectations it is difficult to gauge what we should expect they produce.

20. I found it hard to assess writing devoid of content.

21. There is no place on the rubric to consider how they are making meaning out of this. Is it giving us something interesting?

22. Of course, no. That is for the Critical Thinking Rubric. I found it hard to separate it out. “Well, the paragraphing is not bad…

23. …but they are saying nothing.”

24. For those of us who teach writing we want there to be interesting ideas. The critical thinking piece can’t really be separated from writing totally.

25. I will concur with Marcie that the conversation with colleagues was good.

26. For me that was the most interesting thing. I got to sit with Jane and Bradley for an hour and a half. We talked about how we assess writing and what we do in our classes.

27. I always like opportunities to do that.

28. We have a need to have those conversations to happen even more deliberately outside of the traditional disciplinary boundaries across the curriculum.

29. I have my perspective of what is good writing, but what is good writing in business or electronics? What kind of writing to they need to see produced?

30. If we are trying to create good writers, then we need to see those possibilities and develop that kind of vocabulary.

31. Or agree across the board that these are a standard that we want all our writers to have no matter what their pathway is.

32. Time to talk Writing Assessment Discussion February 3, 2010

33. Part of what came up in our conversations on assessment of writing was we can’t fault the students for not carrying skills over between classes, when that is not necessarily how we structure most classes…

34. …or how we structure curricula… or when we don’t create pathways that are quite deliberate for them to build their abilities.

35. If we have intentional pathways, students can understand how the skills developed in this class will help you in the next class. We haven’t designed our curriculum in a way for students to understand the interrelatedness.

36. Unless we say they have to take 101 before they take 102.

37. Informally surveying my English 101 class, I find people wait until the very end to take it. “I have to have this so I can graduate.”

38. So rather than use those skills in their classes, they put it off until the end.

39. I have faced frustration across the campus. I have heard from other instructors that students enter their classes not being able to write. They have asked me, “Why don’t you do something about their writing?”

40. Maybe they haven’t taken their English yet. I don’t know.

41. We may have moved them from 1-point-1 to 2-point-something. They made progress, but they are still developing.

42. What is disappointing is that we don’t have a college-wide understanding of what is considered college-level writing.

43. In some colleges you take your writing class in your major as well as English 101 independently. Your subsequent course is given in your discipline.

44. I don’t know if we have enough students, enough faculty, and a big enough program to fill courses that way. Could we actually teach a writing class for science majors? I don’t think so.

45. We understand there are disciplinary kinds of writing styles. However, we are talking here about general education.

46. Are there elements that cross disciplines that are really the nuts and bolts?

47. Every car has an engine, but the outside of the car looks different. What we are looking for is “what is good?”

48. We also need to talk about what is writing, because in sciences much of the writing is reporting. What is it that we do when we use written language?

49. We want them to investigate text, examination, and analysis as well as reporting.

50. My interdisciplinary background has fore-fronted the question of “What counts as a contribution?”