Assessing the situation: expert says it’s essential
Dr. Terri Flateby, director of assessment at the University of South Florida, presents a UWC-sponsored workshop on assessing writing Feb. 21 during the assessment conference hosted by Texas A&M.
Instructors who give writing assignments are all too familiar with grading students’ written work. They’re typically less familiar, though, with assessing student writing. The latter is concerned not with evaluating the performance of individuals, but rather with identifying overall patterns of strengths and weaknesses in student work to find ways to teach both writing and course material more effectively.
For Dr. Terri Flateby, that’s an important distinction and one she hopes writing instructors will give more attention.
Flateby, director of assessment at the University of South Florida, came to Texas A&M in February to present a workshop on writing assessment. The workshop, sponsored by the University Writing Center, offered faculty a chance to think about how writing can enhance their pedagogical goals.
For Flateby, writing assessment means “looking at the aggregate and asking what is it students are doing well in general and what is it they’re not doing as well and what can we do to improve?” Those questions should lead back, Flateby says, to additional reflection on instructional methods, assignment design, and curriculum mapping.
To facilitate writing assessment, Flateby and her colleague Elizabeth Metzger have created an assessment tool known as the Cognitive Level and Quality Writing Assessment (CLAQWA.) The instrument is designed both to give specific feedback on writing and to help instructors determine the cognitive level achieved in a text.
The emphasis on cognitive development is one of the things that sets CLAQWA apart from most other assessment instruments. For Flateby, identifying the level of thinking students’ exhibit in their work is crucial and something she believes instructors should consider from the outset.
“I think it’s very important when an assignment is developed for the instructor to think about the cognitive level students need to reach in that assignment,” Flateby explains. “Faculty often think they’re asking students to analyze or synthesize, when in fact they’re just asking students to explain something. So, the faculty member is disappointed, believing students haven’t done what was requested.”
“Faculty sometimes hesitate to give writing assignments because the writing is so poor,” Flateby acknowledges. But she believes there are tools that can help make reading student papers a less onerous task.
One of the many offshoots of the CLAQWA tool, for instance, is a version designed for peer review. It’s very popular on Flateby’s home campus and Flateby herself has become a strong believer in the value of having students respond to the writing of their peers.
“We have faculty who will not give a writing assignment without peer review,” Flateby says. “They feel so strongly about it because they’ve seen how the writing improves.”
Students do have to be given some guidance in how to comment effectively, though. “An instructor can’t just say ‘Review each other’s papers,’” Flateby says. But with appropriate instruction, she feels the results can be impressive.
When asked about the upcoming program- level assessment of Texas A&M’s W course initiative, Flateby encourages faculty here to recognize that any kind of assessment is an iterative process.
“Assessment can be an evolution,” she observes. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
She herself would like to see universities integrate writing into many more courses: “I’m a strong believer in having writing not only in an actual W course, but having writing continue throughout the curriculum. If writing is isolated, students don’t understand the importance of it.”
She compares learning to write to learning to play the piano: if pianists become proficient, but then stop playing, what happens?
“If they go back to playing years later, the proficiency is not going to be the same, and they’re not going to develop and learn nuances,” says Flateby. “There’s an important analogy there. We have to continue to develop students’ writing throughout the curriculum and in various disciplines.”
