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Remember: CAAP test March 31 --
We have several new books in SCI's Becker Library on assessment. One of them is especially thought-provoking as we gear up for the standardized reading test -- to be taken March 31 by sophomores eligible for graduation -- that we use as one of the measures to assess our General Education program.
Now being catalogued and soon to appear on the library shelves are Helping Students Write Well: A Guide for Teachers in All Disciplines by Barbara Walvoord and Writing Research Papers Across the Curriculum by Susan Hubbuch. Walvoord's book, published by the Modern Language Association, offers case studies in several disciplines. And Hubbuch's is written to help students in disciplines as varied as humanities and the hard sciences. They join a casebook titled Assessing Writing Across the Curriculum, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey and Brian Huot. You'll find it on the shelf at 808.04207 / A847 (or will as soon as I turn it back in). Even though we don't have a formal Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at present, the books have a lot to tell us at SCI.
"Writing is not a set of discrete skills that lend themselves to the kind of atomized testing that we see in multiple-choice tests," say Yancey and Huot, "but rather is a way of learning and performing that is philosophical and epistemological as well as behavioral in nature. … Through writing, students learn to explore, analyze, critique, argue, and negotiate, and they learn to talk about all this in the language of rhetoric. (And yes, we hope they learn to copy edit.) In sum, writing is a way of learning, and it is increasingly understood to operate within disciplinary boundaries." The parentheses are in the original; they reflect widespread disagreement among writing professionals about the importance of grammatical conventions relative to the other benchmarks of good writing that Yancey and Huot discuss. While important traits of good writing are common to all disciplines, their relevance to specific learning goals and objectives can vary. The freedom I encourage in student responses to a literary text, for example, wouldn't be quite what the doctor ordered in a lab report.
What's new about writing assessment these days is a greater recognition that our students write in different contexts. I have no way of knowing how many SCI faculty assign written work, for example, but I know I've talked informally about writing goals, standards and teaching methods with instructors in social sciences, history, math and lab sciences. And my students tell me of writing assignments in still other classes. So the evidence suggests our students are in fact now writing -- and reading -- across the curriculum. That means we need tools to assess our students' verbal skills across the curriculum.
One tool, of course, is the CAAP (Collegiate Academic Assessment Proficiency) reading test we'll be giving March 31. It is designed to measure, among other things, "students' ability to determine meaning from context, to infer main ideas and relationships, to generalize and apply information beyond the immediate context, to draw appropriate conclusions, and to make appropriate comparisons." Its questions are drawn from texts in literature, art, music, philosophy, theater, architecture, dance, history, political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics or the physical sciences.
Another tool is something I first learned about in another book we've had in the library for a couple of years now, Creating Writers: Linking Writing Assessment and Instruction by Vicki Spandel. A senior research associate at Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Oregon, Spandel has developed rubrics -- checklists based on normed grading standards -- linked to traits like content, word choice, coherence and grammatical conventions. While her rubrics work better for younger writers, others have developed rubrics for grading college writing. One is Douglas Eder of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, a biologist who has become an expert in higher education learning outcomes assessment.
College-level rubrics typically measure 12 traits, including "[r]esponds fully to the assignment," supports a clearly stated thesis, word choice, coherence, critical thinking, "[i]s free of errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling and format," and, finally, creativity. These traits reflect best practices nationwide, and relate in turn to the exploration, analyis, critique, argumentation and negotiation that Yancey and Huot believe is so important when we assess students' interaction with texts across the academic disciplines. Even though they pertain to writing instead of reading, the 12 traits are just as clearly related to the way students understand main ideas and relationships, generalize and apply information, draw conclusions and make comparisons measured in the CAAP test.
A couple of years ago, I adapted SIU-Edwardsville's rubric and one by Thomas Angelo, a leading authority on classroom assessment, and I've been using it to grade English 111-112 papers ever since. My rubric and grading standards are posted to my website at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/rubrics/gradingrubric.html. I don't have statistics -- my classes are too small to lend themselves to quantitative analysis, and it's all I can do to count to 100 at the best of times, let alone calculate standard deviations -- but I believe the rubrics help me grade more systematically and communicate my standards to students more transparently.
Rubrics aren't for everyone. A lot of very good writing instructors won't touch 'em with a 10-foot pole, preferring their own assessment criteria. And there's a definite art to using them so they aren't just another gimmick in a field already crowded with gimmicks. But they can be useful, especially for those of us who are trained in disciplines other than English composition. If you want to know more about rubrics,Vicki Spandel's book on assessment and instruction would be a good starting place. It's on the shelf at 808.042076 / S735. For a brief discussion, click on the "Grading Standards" and "Rubric for Grading Standard" links on SIU-Edwardsville Classroom Assessment Techniques website at http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/catmain.html. The rubrics can be adapted to different disciplines -- SIU's sample rubric is from an environmental biology course -- and they allow instructors across the curriculum the option of taking part in a national dialog about best practices. In the end, I can speak authoritatively only for myself, but I know using a writing assessment rubric has helped me make the transition from writing newspaper stories by the seat of my pants to teaching freshman composition and measuring student learning outcomes that derive from specific goals and objectives.
Footnote: Douglas Eder's home page at SIU-Edwardsville has the following wisdom, which I'll quote verbatim:
Good advice, I'd say.
-- Pete Ellertsen, editor, Nuts & Bolts
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by the Assessment Committee of Springfield College in Illinois. Members are: Moses Allen, Bob Blankenberger, Alice Gutierrez, Scott McCullar, Dave Saner, Steve Stowers, Barb Tanzyus and Pete Ellertsen; Kevin Broeckling, dean of students, and Jeff Mueller, dean of the college, serve ex officio.
If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at ellertsen@sci.edu.
