Friday, April 27

Today in class we finished up the learning blog presentations and begin to go over the information needed for next week, deemed "Assessment Week." Read through the rest of this blog post, highlighting the assessment and what is expected of you for this weekend. The two posts below this, regarding STV folders and the actual instrument used for assessment, will elaborate on this overview. If you have questions, please let me know. If not, we'll also have a chance to work through some of these things together.

The Illinois State University Writing Program Assessment

Spring 2012

The Assessment Goals: The Assessment instrument includes 8 items – which the students will be asked to respond to in a “report” format.  These items are closely related to our program learning outcomes. They encourage students to reflect on their composition practices, and to use their class productions to analyze and demonstrate their learning. With this assessment we are trying to get a sense of “what learning looks like” in a genre studies based writing course.  We will be analyzing (rather than evaluating) students’ answers to see how they use terms and concepts and how they use examples from their own writing to illustrate their understanding of these terms and concepts. We will not be assessing “writing mastery” in the student texts, nor will we be assessing teacher efficacy. Hopefully, our analysis will also uncover examples that we can use to extend our understanding of how our learning outcomes are being taken up and used by students..  It may also help us consider changes to our learning outcomes, and serve as a baseline for future assessments.

This Assessment is worth: 15 points (along with the various participation points)

When: You’ll get started on organizing and writing stuff. Then, we’ll have Monday-Friday of next week to get everything in order (although we may be finishing up blog presentations on Monday, as well)

What To Do (Some procedures to make our lives/class easier…):

·          This weekend: Gather up your work/main projects from this semester. Don’t forget about some selections from your learning blogs. This will be uploaded onto the STV folder (see page regarding access to STV folder at home) and is your student portfolio. Either:

o   Save them to your student folder (“your name”<Portfolios<Writing Program Assessment<Nicole Osolin) on your home computer. See the next sheet detailing how to get to these folders from hom

o   Or: Save them all onto a thumb drive, bring them to class, and upload them onto the STV folders from here

o   In the least: Have all this work collected

·          Also this weekend:  Begin working on the 8 questions for assessment, making sure to look over each one and see what types of work/examples you need to fully answer the question. I will look over your work in Monday’s class. You will have thru next Friday to finish this up. Keep in mind, your writing is not being graded, so it doesn’t have to be perfect, just readable

o   These documents/answers will then be uploaded to “your name”<Assessments<Writing Program Assessment<Nicole Osolin.”

o   This questions are the last two sheets of this document..