Good and Bad Experiences with Assessment

Positive and Negative Experiences with Writing Assessment (from class Aug. 29th)

Positive

• Clear and explicit about expectations (What and why)
• Scholarship opportunities
• Excited over substantive feedback
• Pleased with revision grade (encourages substantive change); rewarded with good final grade
• Allowances for authentic writing

Negative

• Success? Not really. No understanding of why,
• Failure of communication: undercut as a teacher (lack of trust)
• Unexplained differences in evaluation (seems random)
• Quantitative evaluation seems arbitrary or highly manipulated
• High stakes decisions (often at the end of a time)
• Failure: sentence level issues
• Disagreement between raters
• Control over writing
• Discourages creative risks
• Discouraged over grade evaluation
• Grade inflation (grades aren’t meaningful); outside forces require As for reimbursement
• Over assessed; emotional duress
• Unreasonable time constraints

 

A Brief History of Writing Assessment

Video by Elliot Norbert, author of _On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment_

 

Welcome

Welcome to the blogsite for Writing Assessment in the Age of Digital Technologies, a course at Florida State University (Fall 2013). This site will host student commentary, class comments, links to relevant media, and other materials pertaining to the course. If you are enrolled in the course, your class blogsite will be connected to this page so we can easily access and respond to each others’ work.