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last.updated 11.25.12

Assessing Student Writing

Purpose

Next to class preparation, instructors will put a lot of work into assessing and evaluating student writing. This process is time consuming, and we often wonder whether students actually respond to what we place on their papers. As a result, some instructors will write "novels" on their students' writing; others will write a few words to justify a grade. When assessment is done deliberately it can effectively be a process of justifying one's grade and providing instruction for the students' next writing experience.

Before Class

• Read Anson and Dannels, "Developing Rubrics for Instruction and Evaluation" [BB]
• Read Lunt & Curran, "'Are you listening please?'" [Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 35.7]
• Read Goldstein, "Questions and Answers..." [Journal of Second Language Writing, 13.1]
• Read Ball, "Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students" [BB]

FreeWrite

Answer the following questions so that you can contribute to the class discussion. You have the first ten minutes of class.

Based upon the readings would you use a rubric? If so, how would you design it? If not, what strategies would you use for assessment and why?

Discussion I: Assessment Terms

• Holistic Evaluation: Looks at the writing sample as a single text and evaluates the overall effectiveness of the text. "It assumes that writing is best judged as a whole rather than a series of skills" (White, 1995, pp. 91-2)
• Primary Trait Evaluation: Instructor or scorer chooses some skills that they will focus on when they evaluate a students' writing. Sometimes traits are treated are chosen from writing skills the instructor values and are used for all writing assignments throughout the class; other times these traits are specific to the scaffolding each assignment represents. For an example of a popular scaffolding scheme see the 6+1 model.
  
• Formative Evaluation: Using a students’ performance on the current submission to craft comments that will help students succeed on later assignments. An instructor or assistant will provide formative comments when they are reviewing assignment drafts or when the type of writing that they are evaluating occurs again later in the semester (e.g., another report, short essay, or essay test). Think about your comments as a teaching opportunity in which you can prepare students for future submissions in this course or submissions in future courses.
• Summative Evaluation: Comments that serves to justify the evaluation that you have given. Summative comments tend to be used with final drafts or documents submitted at the end of the semester. Because of their finality, summative comments tend to be more concise than formative comments.

We will also discuss the following terms from Dornan et al. (p. 183-4):

• Responding: writing, commenting on papers at any stage of the writing process; focus is mostly on communication with the writer; responders unavoidably makes subjective decisions about the way the text should be. (I also call this reviewing)
• Assessing: collecting data with the purpose of describing what is going on; assessor will often use predetermined criteria to collect data; should be descriptive, but is often judgmental (e.g., SOLs)
• Evaluating: judgments based upon on explicit or implicit criteria; comparing a piece to standards (e.g., a rubric).
• Grading: judgmental and summative; usually confined to A-F marks

Discussion II: Methods of Assessment

The discussion today will address the following questions:

• What questions do you have about the readings?
• How do you plan to assess writing and why?

Activity: Assessment Philosophy

You will be given 30 minutes to compose an assessment philosophy. In this philosophy, you will want to address the following:

• Explain what you want students to get out of your assessment of their compositions.
• What specific practices will you adopt to achieve those outcomes?
• How should these practices help you fulfill these outcomes? In other words, what does the theory say about how this practice should work?
• How do these practices best connect to the composition movement you connect with the most?
• How do these practices also reflect institutional expectations? How are your practices being negotiated with these expectations?
• How do your practices consider diverse student populations?

You will be able to bring this philosophy with you to the Evaluation Simulation; therefore, it is recommended that you cite some material that you anticipate will inform your practices for during the simulation.

After you are done writing, you will read it to two other group members. In these groups, think about which ideas the writer should expand to make her/his philosophy more clear and more connected to the field's theory. If time permits, we will have a few of these philosophies shared with the class.