Evaluating College Writing Programs
Evaluating College Writing Programs

Author: Stephen Paul Witte

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9780809311248

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Noting that present evaluation systems are so limited that they are neither reliable nor valid, this monograph critically reviews studies designed to evaluate composition programs at four major universities. The book offers theoretical and practical guidance through discussion of generalities from the four studies and pertinent questions and guidance to evaluators of composition programs. The first chapter looks at the state of the art of evaluating writing programs, discussing the need for such evaluation, and at two dominant approaches to writing program evaluation. The second chapter discusses a quantitative model of writing program evaluation in terms of four university studies, giving an overview of the dominant quantitative approach. Chapter 3 discusses a framework for evaluating college writing programs, including five components of writing program evaluation, and the final chapter discusses accommodating context and change in writing program evaluation. (HTH)

Organic Writing Assessment
Organic Writing Assessment

Author: Bob Broad

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0874217318

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Educators strive to create “assessment cultures” in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad’s 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad’s original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies. Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM’s flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.

Writing Programs Worldwide
Writing Programs Worldwide

Author: Chris Thaiss

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2012-07-30

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 160235345X

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WRITING PROGRAMS WORLDWIDE offers an important global perspective to the growing research literature in the shaping of writing programs. The authors of its program profiles show how innovators at a diverse range of universities on six continents have dealt creatively over many years with day-to-day and long-range issues affecting how students across disciplines and languages grow as communicators and learners.

Writing Program Administration
Writing Program Administration

Author: Susan H. McLeod

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2007-03-16

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1602350094

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This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Very Like a Whale
Very Like a Whale

Author: Edward M. White

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2015-03-04

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1457193515

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Written for those who design, redesign, and assess writing programs, Very Like a Whale is an intensive discussion of writing program assessment issues. Taking its title from Hamlet, the book explores the multifaceted forces that shape writing programs and the central role these programs can and should play in defining college education. Given the new era of assessment in higher education, writing programs must provide valid evidence that they are serving students, instructors, administrators, alumni, accreditors, and policymakers. This book introduces new conceptualizations associated with assessment, making them clear and available to those in the profession of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. It also offers strategies that aid in gathering information about the relative success of a writing program in achieving its identified goals. Philosophically and historically aligned with quantitative approaches, White, Elliot, and Peckham use case study and best-practice scholarship to demonstrate the applicability of their innovative approach, termed Design for Assessment (DFA). Well grounded in assessment theory, Very Like a Whale will be of practical use to new and seasoned writing program administrators alike, as well as to any educator involved with the accreditation process.

Assessing Writing
Assessing Writing

Author: Brian Huot

Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Published: 2008-04-04

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 9780312475963

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Assessing Writing assembles the essential research for any writing instructor — from graduate student to program director — who wants to understand and implement effective large-scale writing assessment. Topics include the history of the field; the concepts of validity and reliability; assessment methods, such as portfolios, essay exams, and directed self-placement; and models of successful assessment programs.

Center Will Hold
Center Will Hold

Author: Michael Pemberton

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2003-12-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 087421484X

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In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

Labor-based Grading Contracts
Labor-based Grading Contracts

Author: Asao B. Inoue

Publisher: Wac Clearinghouse

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781607329251

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Asao B. Inoue argues for the use of labor-based grading contracts along with compassionate practices to determine course grades as a way to do social justice work with students.

Guide to College Writing Assessment
Guide to College Writing Assessment

Author: Peggy O'Neill

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0874217334

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While most English professionals feel comfortable with language and literacy theories, assessment theories seem more alien. English professionals often don’t have a clear understanding of the key concepts in educational measurement, such as validity and reliability, nor do they understand the statistical formulas associated with psychometrics. But understanding assessment theory—and applying it—by those who are not psychometricians is critical in developing useful, ethical assessments in college writing programs, and in interpreting and using assessment results. A Guide to College Writing Assessment is designed as an introduction and source book for WPAs, department chairs, teachers, and administrators. Always cognizant of the critical components of particular teaching contexts, O’Neill, Moore, and Huot have written sophisticated but accessible chapters on the history, theory, application and background of writing assessment, and they offer a dozen appendices of practical samples and models for a range of common assessment needs. Because there are numerous resources available to assist faculty in assessing the writing of individual students in particular classrooms, A Guide to College Writing Assessment focuses on approaches to the kinds of assessment that typically happen outside of individual classrooms: placement evaluation, exit examination, programmatic assessment, and faculty evaluation. Most of all, the argument of this book is that creating the conditions for meaningful college writing assessment hinges not only on understanding the history and theories informing assessment practice, but also on composition programs availing themselves of the full range of available assessment practices.

Evaluating Writing
Evaluating Writing

Author: Charles Raymond Cooper

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13:

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Intended to guide writing teachers through the complexities of evaluation, the essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches to evaluation. The essays display, however, some common beliefs about what is fundamentally important to writing teachers' work--specifically, the need: to distinguish between "grading" and "evaluation"; to develop the ability to describe students' writing; to connect teaching and evaluation; and to continually reexamine assumptions and practices that guide evaluation. Following an introduction by the editors, the 17 essays and their authors are, as follows: (1) "Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work" (Lee Odell); (2) "What We Know about Genres, and How It Can Help Us Assign and Evaluate Writing" (Charles R. Cooper); (3) "Audience Considerations for Evaluating Writing" (Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Elizabeth Vander Lei, and Duane H. Roen); (4) "Coaching Writing Development: Syntax Revisited, Options Explored" (William Strong); (5) "Cohesion and Coherence" (Martha Kolln); (6) "Assessing Portfolios" (Sandra Murphy); (7) "How to Read a Science Portfolio" (Denise Stavis Levine); (8) "Using Writing to Assess Mathematics Pedagogy and Students' Understanding" (Richard S. Millman); (9) "Evaluating Student Writing about History" (Kathleen Medina); (10) "Evaluating Students' Response Strategies in Writing about Literature" (Richard W. Beach); (11) "Evaluating the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students: The Case of the African American Vernacular English Speaker" (Arnetha F. Ball); (12) "Latino ESL Students and the Development of Writing Abilities" (Guadalupe Valdes and Patricia Anloff Sanders); (13) "Texts in Contexts: Understanding Chinese Students' English Compositions" (Guanjun Cai); (14) "Reflective Reading: Developing Thoughtful Ways To Respond to Students' Writing" (Chris M. Anson); (15) "Creating a Climate for Portfolios" (Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith); (16) "Integrating Reading and Writing in Large-Scale Assessment" (Fran Claggett); and (17) "Let Them Experiment: Accommodating Diverse Discourse Practices in Large-Scale Writing Assessment" (Roxanne Mountford). (NKA)