Writing, Assessment, and the Authority of the Disciplines (original) (raw)
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Coming on the heels of the public's demand for more initiatives of accountability within higher education, the edited volume, Reclaiming Accountability: Improving Writing programs through Accreditation and Large-Scale Assessment, interrogates the intersections of accrediting agencies that require large-scale assessment and the writing instructors and Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) who must design and implement these assessment procedures. When exploring the best practices for writing assessment in higher education, the editors grapple with the question: what are the strengths and weaknesses of assessment structures and assessment-driven improvement initiatives? To begin answering this question, the editors bring together critical case studies from a variety of higher education contexts across the United States. According to the edited collection, one of the primary goals of large-scale assessment is to obtain the necessary data to account for student learning in the composition classroom. Composition instructors, WPAs, Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID) scholars, and junior scholars interested in the role of writing assessment at the institutional level may find this text insightful as it outlines the historical relationship between accrediting agencies, program administrators, and writing instructors.
Measuring Writing as a Representation of Disciplinary Knowledge
2012
Most students are exposed to different writing genres as well as to grammar and other writing-specific skills during their required composition course(s). Discipline-specific writing skills are often not taught, rather they are assumed to be prerequisite knowledge by disciplinary instructors. Rubrics are often used by instructors to measure these skills; however, few rubrics integrate measurement of both general and discipline-specific skills. One such rubric has been designed by the Academy of Process Educators. The present research examines the empirical reliability and validity of this rubric. It was hypothesized that consistency of ratings would be achieved for three different types of writing by four raters from different disciplines when read in a counterbalanced pattern. The Written Communication Value Rubric from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U, 2012) was also utilized to make possible the evaluation of concurrent validity of the two rubrics. Dif...
Creating and validating assessment instruments for a discipline-specific writing course
Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2007
This paper reports on a sustained interdisciplinary effort between applied linguists and chemistry faculty to create and validate writing assessment instruments for an advanced-level Write Like a Chemist course, one component of a much larger interdisciplinary project. The article describes a multiple-year effort to form valid analytic and holistic assessment instruments to be used by chemistry faculty to assess the writing performance of chemistry majors. Emphasis is placed on the joint contributions of applied linguists and chemists in (a) the identification of meaningful writing criteria, (b) the development of assessment scales with distinct score points and descriptors, (c) socialization sessions that prepared chemists to help build the assessment instruments, and (d) the validation of assessment instruments with other chemists. Outcomes exemplify the mediating role that applied linguistics can play in the design of a discipline-specific course, instructional materials, and assessment instruments that support the development of disciplinary expertise. The results also demonstrate the positive consequences of crossing disciplinary boundaries for both subject-area faculty and applied linguists.
Proceedings of the BAAL Annual Conference, 2008
This paper compares evaluation in student assignments across the four disciplinary groups of Arts and Humanities (AH), Social Sciences (SS), Life Sciences (LS) and Physical Sciences (PS). It combines a genre analysis of the BAWE 1 corpus as texts with a multidimensional register analysis of the corpus as text and a frequency analysis of specific amplifiers and attributive adjectives used across the disciplines. This approach is intended to complement more detailed manual analysis which can uncover the prosodic nature of evaluation, the range of grammatical resources , the functions of evaluation , and how evaluation occurs even where texts " [do] not contain what is commonly thought of as evaluative language" (Hunston 1992:197).
Analyzing Writing in Academic Disciplines: A few concepts
L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature
The analytic frame presented in this contribution seeks to enable careful, systematic and complex consideration of the various factors that contribute to language use in disciplinary settings across all grade levels. Three key concepts are presented: disciplinary awareness, disciplinary configurations, and writing universes, in which genres and practices interact. Describing the elements of these three concepts leads to a foregrounding of the tensions that student writers must negotiate as they produce language acts in different disciplinary contexts. The contribution bases its exploration of an analytic frame for language activity in the disciplines on insights developed through extended study of the work of apprentice writers and speakers in various settings, studying their interactions with scholastic and disciplinary life through their interaction with and representations of the objects and modes associated with different school subjects.
The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado eBooks, 2024
The Perspectives on Writing series addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms. The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the series editors are committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate and have embraced the use of technology to support open access to scholarly work.
The Evaluators of Student Writing
In a study of factOrs that influence evalUators, ratings of student papers, 32 student essays were rewritten toiake them stronger or weaker in content, bigq.nitation, sentence structure, or mechanics; the essays" were then sutmitted to/dvaluitorsin both, their original and rewritten forms to deterisine'the way in which the .changes influenced the ratings. This paper discusses the procedures used ip selecting the essays to be rewritten, rewriting them, and having them-evaluated; it then, reports the results of the study, examines the ,relationship between the htlistic ratings and the raters' perceptions of the papers' strengths or weaknesses in each of the rewritten categories, and discusses the results and their. pedagogical significance. Among the major findings. were that the most , important influences. on rAerso scores were the content and then the organization of the essays and that sentence structure and medhadice proved to be far less significant influences on holistiC judgments. Seven tables are included. (GK) .