Project Objectives:
In this project, we aim 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 essays and course grades as ways to measure student achievement, and they have aimed to standardize grading and rubrics to make the process more efficient and effective. This project adopts a very different approach, using the revised Directed Self-Placement as a model. The FYWR courses aim to hone students’ abilities to read critically and write academic arguments that are in conversation with published scholarship. The courses 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. 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 over 4000 undergraduates per year and to further the pedagogical development of more than 30 Lecturers and more than 80 GSIs, most of whom plan to pursue careers in education.
Project Achievements:
During the summer of 2011, members of the Stage I research team collected and summarized relevant research about reflection and self-assessment in the writing classroom, and they began to gather information about first-year writing courses at other schools and universities. The team then created a few self-assessment materials for instructors to use in their first-year writing courses. During the Fall of 2011, four instructors participated in a pilot study that involved emphasizing the importance of self-reflection throughout the semester and using the self-assessment materials that the research team developed, including a final essay assignment that focused on the question “How does one learn to write?” At the start of the Fall semester, members of the research team conducted initial interviews with instructors and students who were participating in the pilot study, and they discovered some resistance to the concept of self-reflection. Several students expressed the view that self-reflection tends to be a form of “busywork” that lacks rigor and utility. The instructors expressed the view that they did not have time to add self- reflection and self-assessment to their already full lesson plans, and they were unsure about how to assess or grade students’ self-assessments. However, in their exit interviews—conducted during the Winter of 2012—the instructors expressed far more enthusiasm about foregrounding self-assessment in their first-year writing courses. They noted the value of: 1) cultivating reflection as a crucial “habit of mind” for writers; 2) developing a shared vocabulary that students can use in reflecting on their own writing and writing processes; 3) using students’ self-assessments as a springboard for responding to their work; 4) developing self-assessment techniques that are suited to first-year students’ writing levels; 5) creating multiple, daily ways to incorporate self-reflection in writing classes; 6) talking with students about how they might transfer the skills that they learn in writing courses to their other college courses; and 7) establishing rigorous standards for evaluating students’ self-reflection and self-assessments. . While acknowledging the value of fostering self-assessment in their writing courses, the instructors also highlighted additional ways in which the English Department Writing Program could assist instructors with fostering self-assessment among first-year students. Specifically, the instructors asked for: 1) guidance for creating syllabi that foreground self-reflection and self-assessment; 2) sample lesson plans, activities, and assignments that foster self-assessment; 3) guidance for developing a shared vocabulary that students can use in reflecting on their writing and writing processes; and 4) guidance for incorporating New Media as a tool for self-reflection and self-assessment.
Continuation:
We hope to build on the results of our Stage I research by developing materials and pedagogical modules that will help GSIs and lecturers to foreground self-reflection and self-assessment in their writing courses. Specifically, we hope to: 1) write a new chapter about self-reflection for Teaching First-year Writing: A Guide for New Instructors of English 124 and 125; 2) create a range of sample lesson plans, activities, and assignments that foster self-assessment; 3) develop a teaching module about self-assessment for the August training that we offer for new GSIs and lecturers; and 4) create a website called “The Self-Assessment Project,” which will include a working bibliography of recommended readings for instructors, sample exercises and assignments, and brief video clips of students and instructors discussing their experiences with using the self-assessment materials that we’ll be developing. Accomplishing these goals will enable us to foster productive pedagogical habits among new instructors and reinforce and/or augment the reflective practices that experienced instructors already cultivate in their courses.
Dissemination:
We have already communicated the results of our Stage I research to new GSIs and lecturers, during their two-day August training. If awarded a Stage II grant, we will develop new print, online, and oral materials that will better enable all of our GSIs and lecturers to foreground self-reflection and self-assessment in their writing courses
