Assessment of Student Learning in First-Year Writing Requirement Courses
Academic Year:
2010 - 2011 (June 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011)
Funding Requested:
$9,994.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
Overview of the Project:
This project aims to develop an innovative assessment tool to measure students' achievement of the goals of first-year writing requirement (FYWR) courses. Similar assessment initiatives have often focused on final essay and course grades as a way to measure student achievement, and have aimed to standardize grading and rubrics to make the process a more efficient and effective one. This project adopts a very different approach, using the revised Directed Self-Placement as a model. The FYWR courses aim to hone students' skills at reading critically and at writing academic arguments that put their arguments in conversation with published scholarship. They also aim to develop students' meta-awareness of the rhetorical demands of different kinds of writing situations and genres as well as their awareness of their most effective writing process. Therefore, in order to measure students' achievement of these goals, any assessment tool needs to ask students both to produce written academic argument and to reflect on the reading and the writing they have produced, in terms of genre conventions and rhetorical strategies and in terms of their writing process. This project is financially modest yet pedagogically sweeping: it promises to benefit every year over 4000 undergraduates' experience in our writing classrooms and further the pedagogical development of over 80 GSIs, most of whom plan to pursue careers in education, and over 30 Lecturers.