Course-level
Assessing
First-Year Writing Courses: Shaping Rubrics and Inspiring Faculty
Abstract:
This presentation will
highlight assessment methodologies, tools, and results that were developed to
assess first-year writing at Cal Poly,
San Luis Obispo.
In approaching this program assessment, our research question was thus:
what level of achievement do students
reach while enrolled in first-year writing?
In other words, our assessment sought to determine the degree to which
students improve as writers during ten weeks in their required first-year
writing course.
Audience:
We believe that both our
assessment methods and our results will be useful for writing programs that are
in the beginning stages of assessing student achievement in first-year writing
courses. Our survey and scoring data
have enabled us to look more deeply at the outcomes of our first-year writing
courses. Further, we have found that
the results of this study have been especially useful to instructors who teach
writing at subsequent levels because the data illustrate the level of
achievement from which to build when crafting the curriculum for sophomore and
junior-level writing-intensive courses.
Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this workshop,
participants should be able to:
-
Implement pilot assessments of their first-year writing programs
-
Generate a program-specific writing rubric
-
Identify the relationship between survey (indirect) and rubric-scored
(direct) data
-
Understand the resources needed for writing assessment
-
Identify the challenges of writing assessment
Conducted by:
Debra L. Valencia-Laver, Ph.D. is the
Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts
at California
Polytechnic
State
University,
San Luis Obispo
and a Professor in the Psychology and Child Development Department, specializing
in cognitive psychology and adult development and aging. She has helped with
assessment efforts for General Education and the development of university,
college, and departmental learning objectives, in addition to serving on several
campus-level assessment committees.
Brenda M. Helmbrecht, Ph.D.,
an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, directs the Writing Program
and serves as one of the university’s learning outcomes consultants,
specializing in writing assessment.
She helps coordinate writing assessment efforts across campus, and is
particularly focused on assessing student’s achievements as writers across class
levels.
She has also helped create a
university-wide writing rubric that makes cross-disciplinary writing assessment
possible.
