Pedagogy 8 (3): 2008

Using Assessment to Introduce Incremental Change, Lynne Rhodes, USCA

In 1996, along with our proposal to initiate the JWP, we had created a course that would help to remediate and to develop student writing skills at the sophomore level, directed at students who either could not pass the review, even after a second portfolio submission, or for students who simply had no papers as juniors to compile a portfolio. At first, I was the sole instructor of the course, and I also taught the course to a small number of students at distant campuses via electronic mail and occasional visits. Over the decade that we have integrated the portfolio review into our general education expectations, however, other instructors have gradually assumed the teaching of AEGL 201, Writing in the University, and now eight additional instructors have assisted with the sometime arduous task of teaching seniors in majors that range from biology and business, to education, to nursing, and sociology how to “write” in the academic setting. As a core group of teachers, we have to meet regularly to share syllabi and assignments, to discuss expectations, and to troubleshoot. We’ve had to collaborate even though we sometimes have differing views; some of the faculty who now teach the course place more emphasis on developmental and remedial sentence-level concerns, while others who now teach the course emphasize synthesis of source-based material and argument. Our recent discussions seem to be leading us into more discipline-specific sections of the course with proposals to initiate sections of the course that target particular majors, such as business or nursing students. I foresee that more team-teaching and thus more intense collaborative curricular designs are indeed in our future, as we continue to refine delivery of AEGL 201.

I also continually meet with diverse faculty across our campus to discuss expectations, to share student portfolios with advisors, and to recruit and train additional faculty as graders. Because we are a campus heavily invested in the process of program review, and because all of our major programs require students to take a general education core, the Junior Writing Portfolio has been adopted by a number of degree programs as an assessment that allows insights into student writing skills; indeed, many programs such as our School of Education have mandated that students must “satisfy” the assessment review as prerequisites to upper-level courses or activities such as practice teaching or senior capstone courses. Our Institutional Research office has been proactive in creating a massive database to which I add three times annually, so that faculty advisors, department chairs and school deans, and our Registrar and I have regular conversations about those occasional students who reach graduate status without having satisfied the portfolio review. In many respects, the reporting of student results has fallen to me, and I anticipate regular activities such as setting up the semester’s database of submissions, recruiting and monitoring faculty graders, recording scores, calibrating third readings, and counseling students who can be advised to appeal their failed first submissions by revising and resubmitting.

We had additionally argued, when phasing out our developmental course, that our caps on enrollment in our first year composition classes would have to be reduced (to 18 and 20 in AEGL 101 / 102 respectively), and that we would need to closely monitor instructional practices and student learning outcomes in our first year composition classes. For many years, while placement testing, we had reported our placement results and our successful completion of AEGL 101, developmental writing, as pre / post results. Probably because we had become so attuned to viewing our composition sequence as a continuum through which to assess student writing skills, we determined that we would use a modified portfolio in freshman English as a form of general education program review. We established a departmental assessment committee, which became the primary site for monitoring and refining this freshman assessment instrument. We labeled our composition sequence assessment the Freshman Folders, and we began annually to collect student writing from both AEGL 101 and AEGL 102, by starting with a selected sample from all of the AEGL 101 rolls, which was tracked into AEGL 102. After the student samples were gathered at the end of a Spring semester, a team of raters evaluate the folders, using the same rubric that we had refined for JWP purposes, and the data gathered and analyzed from this review is regularly shared with the entire department each fall.