syllabus
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11.27.16
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Evaluating & Assessing Student Work
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. We will discuss our responsibilties as writing instructors when it comes to assessment as well as practices that might make the process more efficient.
Before
Class
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 share a few of these philosophies with the class.
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