At a glance:
 
Consultant-evaluators visit
Assessment and empowerment
Ziemer's best practices in "mega-class"
Grading and primary trait scoring--time-saver
Art history and ranking student writing
Minor and different forms of writing

Professors Deborah Holdstein from Governors State and William Condon from Washington State recently came to do a consultant-evaluation of writing at NIU. Cross-disciplinary faculty, the Council of Deans, and the Provost participated.  Holdstein and Condon found many strengths:
First-Year Composition gives students a firm basis to build upon.
The RH 306A Writing Center, though very small, provides consistent and increasing faculty support.
Many NIU departments have courses that guide students toward proficient disciplinary writing.

Writing assessment can empower faculty while enhancing recruitment and retention.  So says Professor William Condon, a consultant-evaluator from the national Council of Writing Program Administrators.  Condon hails from Washington State University, where faculty have invented an exciting new assessment system and rewarding new roles for themselves.

Ten years ago, WSU faculty realized freshman composition did not “inoculate” students against the need for further writing instruction.  Employers complained regularly about students’ writing skills.  Some companies stopped hiring WSU graduates.  Eventually state legislators tried to impose assessment measures on WSU to ensure writing proficiency.  The faculty replied, “Thanks, but we have a better idea.”

WSU faculty designed a WAC program that rewarded them with promotion and tenure credit, reduced class loads, and lowered enrollment caps to teach courses emphasizing “writing in the major.”  WSU faculty established “rising junior portfolios” that accommodated both native and transfer students; portfolios became a prerequisite to graduation.  WSU  required a combination of timed and multiply drafted writing in the portfolios, charging students modest submission fees.  Faculty teams assessed the submissions—usually 3,000 portfolios a year.  The teams got paid from the submission fees and received further credit for annual merit, promotion and tenure for reading.  82% of faculty readers came from disciplines other than English.

WSU has a two-tier assessment system based on the question: “Does each portfolio demonstrate competent writing in the student’s discipline?”  Categories of “pass,” “pass with distinction,” and “needs improvement” streamline the reading process.  Students who need improvement take courses that offer further instruction in disciplinary writing, to achieve the written proficiency that their respective majors require.

What’s the result?  Condon says that students enroll at WSU because of the institution’s emphasis on writing.  The WAC program is featured in brochures, on WSU’s website, and in recruitment activities.  Regional high schools and two-year colleges have formed stronger partnerships with WSU.  Parents endorse the program.  Employers seek WSU graduates.  Students demonstrate 92% improvement in writing between their freshman and junior years.

The NIU faculty attending Condon’s presentation examined WSU’s pro-faculty, pro-student system of writing assessment, exploring how NIU departments and colleges might adopt a similar system.  They agreed that the time is right to make writing a winning priority on our campus, too.

Students find that Professor Norb Ziemer cares about their development as writers.  Ziemer, who teaches UBUS 223: Intro to Business Statistics, assigns a project that invents, analyzes, and organizes a context for a business flight.

The section of 250 students breaks into collaborative groups so the project is manageable.  Each group writes up a project proposal, a presentation, and a report.  Each student does an evaluation of her own—and her peers’—contributions.

This semester, Ziemer invited experienced tutors from the Writing Center in Reavis 306A to talk about how to do a good job of researching and composing the project.  Students turned in brief, written progress reports to which the tutors responded.

Although Ziemer finds the project challenging, he strongly believes that 200-level courses should require students to continue to grow as writers.  He has begun to use the Writing Center as a resource to supplement and sustain that growth.

At the end of the semester, professors feel especially pressured to get grading finished efficiently and quickly.  Primary trait scoring can help.  With primary trait scoring—an explicit, criterion-referenced method—professors:

• Identify traits that count (e.g. thesis, materials & method, organization, comprehension, creativity, problem identification & solution).
• Build a scale to score a student’s performances on those traits.
• Evaluate student’s performance against those traits.

Consult Effective Grading, ed. B. Walvoord & V. Anderson (Jossey-Bass 1998) for more information about primary trait scoring.  The example below, for weekly journal entries in math, illustrates.

Criteria (rank 1-2-3-4-5; 5 is high, 1 low)

• Thoroughness of Comments: Do you demonstrate deeper processing of thought, interpretation, applications/relationships to other material?
• Completeness: Do you discuss all important points and avoid omissions of information?
• Understanding: Do you correctly understand ideas and give evidence to illustrate your understanding?
• Personal Connections: Do you connect the information to personal experiences and observations?
• Growth: Do you give evidence that your understanding has increased and you’ve learned something you didn’t previously know?
• Inquiry: Have you asked additional questions not yet answered?
• Problem Completion: Have you attempted to resolve problems, or have you merely skimmed them over?
• General Quality: What is the overall quality that your journal entries demonstrate, compared to “best entries” we’ve shared in class?

Jeff Kowalski recently asked the WAC coordinator at NIU to facilitate an “assessment meeting” on samples of student writing.  The faculty read the samples previous to the meeting.  They ranked the samples according to a rubric based on primary trait scoring.  Then the faculty discussed reasons each professor had for ranking the samples.

The meeting yielded unexpected benefits when faculty discovered each other’s methods of designing assignments.

For example, Avra Liakos assigns a traditional term paper in many of her courses—but she also asks students to turn in abstracts of their paper at different intervals during the semester.  Each abstract, only a paragraph long, describes how the students are changing and developing their papers in response to reading assignments, research findings, or course lectures and discussions.  Liakos has a very clear idea of what each student will be writing when the paper is due, and she knows the process of thinking that accompanied each student’s work.

Mary Quinlan designs an assignment where students turn in different parts of an essay at intervals.  Because the essay is separated into shorter parts, she can grade them progressively or return parts to students for revision, whenever the work seems weak.  At the end of the semester, her students have a complete piece they can put into a portfolio as a whole product.

Carole Minor conducts a seminar for instructors of EPCO 211: Career Planning.  The instructors have a common syllabus that requires juniors and seniors in the course to do a wide range of writing activities.

Students keep a journal where they record their reactions to course readings and activities.  They compose a “current plans” essay that asks them to envision exactly what they see themselves doing after graduation, why, and for what purposes.  The students then interview a person already working in their chosen career and report their findings.  They go on to do an occupational research report, a critique of articles on their chosen career, a personal skills assessment, a description of their ideal job, a resume, a cover letter, and a final project on strategic academic and career planning.

By the time the students have completed all written assignments, they become aware of how the writing has sequenced their conceptual development.
Simultaneously, the EPCO 211 instructors gain a clear understanding of how to guide each student by means of written commentary on the student’s writing.  The emphasis on student-teacher development uses writing as a two-way technique for creating professional identity.