Reading Responses
Reading Response 5/4 - Rachel's Thoughts on Creative Writing/ Multimodal Composition Assessment
This week while I know it said to post four articles from The Journal of Assessment in Writing (which I did grab 2 from that journal) I searched outside of it for what I am very curious about which is how one assesses creative writing. As you know I earned my MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University in 2017, assessment there was strange. You did the work you got a good grade, but the comments you would get would make you think you did not deserve such a good grade. As I am qualified to teach creative writing, and got the opportunity this semester to teach a couple creative writing units in my literature and pop culture course, this has been a burning question the past few weeks. Is holistic the way to go? Should it be on an individual basis? How does one grade when every writer is unique and their work very different? How do you even assess one’s creativity? Can you assess effort shown? What matters in evaluating creative writing? And then I also had to think of how one assesses creative multimodal texts as I teach how to do that as well.
I want to be better than my creative writing/tv production professors. Give great feedback, but make a student feel as if effort is rewarded and a grade is not just a completion sticker for being a good student. I want my students of creativity to feel like I am taking their work seriously and I want it to be the best it can be. While grades are sometimes focused on too much, in creative writing it is focused on too little to the point of can it even be assessed? So I did my research and here is what I found.
The question of whether creative writing can be assessed or not is hotly debated. The argument rests on the common misconception that subjective criteria (teachers' likes and dislikes) are the sole source of estimating creativity in a piece of writing. The idea is so influential that Carey (2005), like many others, posits that "the evaluation of works of art is purely subjective and thus cannot be codified" (p. 52 as cited in Newman, 2007). In contrast, May (2007) criticizes the assumption and argues that to objectify evaluation teachers should endeavor to set standard criteria for evaluating creative works. Rubrics or grading grids are the best ways to ensure objectivity in creativity assessment (Blomer, 2011). However, the discipline heavily suffers from such standards as Newman (2007) maintains "creative writing courses do not have as yet the explicit national standards or benchmarks for assessment that have been compiled for many other long-established subjects" (p. 26). Thus, the present study attempts to develop an assessment rubric which encompasses the major qualities of creative language. (Mozaffari, 2013, p. 2215).
To this end, the literature on qualities of creative language was reviewed. It was found that creative writing includes 4 major qualities including image, voice, characterization and story (p. 2215).
An image is a word or series of words that evoke one or more of our senses…Voice is external manifestation in language of the writer's sensibility: how she sees the world; her values and what she is attracted to in terms of subject matter”… There are two distinct ways of characterization: (a) Direct characterization in which the writer directly tells the reader what a character is like and is usually accomplished through description, and (b) indirect characterization in which the writer gives the reader some information and allows him/her to draw his/her own conclusion about the kind of person the character is. This is often accomplished through: (a) action: what a character does through the narrative, (b) thought: what a character thinks about, how a character thinks about his/her surrounding, (c) dialogue: what a character says and how it is said, (d) setting: where and when a character is situated in, and (e) symbol: objects and details which signify various information about a character such as names, entertaining choices, etc…, story refers to a narrative which puts events in a sequence from A to Z. Story as a quality of creative language implies that instead of conveying a purpose (to inform, to enlighten, to entertain, etc.) through a formal statement, the writer provides the reader with some information which allows the reader to draw his/her own conclusion about the purpose of the text. (Mozaffari, 2013, pp. 2216).
Despite the widespread use of rubrics for evaluating creative writing, most of them suffer from lack of reliability and validity (especially construct validity). In other words, they contain criteria which are either too general too be easily measured, irrelevant to creativity in writing (mechanics, organization, etc.) or even left some crucial aspects of creativity behind. This study tried to bring together the most crucial features of creativity and to exclude the irrelevant ones. The proposed analytical rubric proved to be a useful tool for assessing creativity which benefits from sufficient values of validity and reliability. However, further empirical research is required to substantiate the results. (Mozaffari, 2013, pp. 2218).
The pedagogy of the discipline of creative writing has the capacity to fulfil important academic learning outcomes. For students learning creative writing, which uses a methodology based on a reading/writing approach to texts, these outcomes include gaining skills in language use, advanced reading and critical skills, and increased knowledge of genres and contexts of literature and writing. In its teaching methodology creative writing usually differs from other subjects taught in English or cultural studies departments in that it is student-centered and active; it promotes deep learning through active engagement with both reading and writing. The interpolation of creative writing into the humanities curriculum highlights the distinctions in outcomes between a conventional transmission model of most university literature teaching, and a model of student-centred learning where learning activities are directed towards the outcome of knowledge accumulation based on conceptual change. Because creative writing is student-centred, with students creating and responding to textual material, it forces teachers to focus on the student learning outcomes in the texts and responses they produce. (Freiman, 2002, p. 2).
The creative writing subjects' aims are to encourage students to write creatively and experimentally, to develop their writing skills, to become self-reflexive about their own writing, and to develop their critical and reading abilities…Assessment is based on the production of crafted writing that demonstrates an engagement with course topics, participation in workshops, demonstrated processing of writing, and a self-reflexive essay. (Frieman, 2002, p.4).
Student generated writing can be viewed as both the process and the outcome of individual knowledge construction. It is a process where, through language and the action of writing/eading "new" knowledge is enacted, or performed, and constructed. But the nature of writing/reading and rewriting/re-reading allows for constant processing and re-processing by the individual learner. (Frieman, 2002, p. 6).
In all workshops, and for students who participate consistently, the capacity for considered reflective articulation of ideas on readings and writing is developed. Having all workshop interaction in writing means that there is a need to carefully think out one's ideas, to be able to support them, and express them clearly in writing. Moreover, the fact that they remain there for the duration of the course acts as a form of "published", or recorded, critique, promoting the motivation for good performance. At their best, online discussions form a progressive narrative thread, mediated by both instructor and students. (Frieman, 2002, p.8).
These are promoted through activities where students "perform" their level of understanding, that is, that they demonstrate this understanding through their learning process. Creative writing is both constructive of language formations, and reflective, demonstrating the constructivist emphasis that university teaching produces reflective practitioners - reflection being "a metacognitive strategy, that is, the process of thinking about thinking (e.g. thinking about how to approach a task) (Frieman, 2002, p.12).
When assessing creative writing and having students assess fellow students writing via workshops it is important that these responses are “high-level” in depth and reflexive in order for each writer to gain the most out of the workshop. As an educator we must assess their assessments as calibration and to make sure everyone is both learning how to think creatively, critically, and reflectively about the creative process and their work.
Rubrics, if too generic and spread too wide amongst an institution, can become a vague crutch where assessment isn’t necessarily valid or reliable. (Anson et al., 2012).
When teachers work out performance criteria for their own specific assignments, they also reference the content that informs the assignments, which all-purpose rubrics, by their very nature, must ignore. Because they are generic, such rubrics focus on empty structures that are deliberately void of meaningful information--information communicated purposefully to an audience. Generic criteria divorce aspects of communication such as "voice," "organization," or "support" from the actual material the student is writing or speaking about. (Anson et al., 2012, p. 12).
Although it could be argued that generic criteria provide a starting point by providing language whose heuristic value compels faculty in the disciplines to think about general but sometimes unconsidered concepts such as "rhetorical purpose" or "style appropriate to the defined or invoked audience," there is too much risk that such criteria will "make do" for everything students produce. Working in the interstitial spaces between learning and assessing learning will never be easy or quick, but it is essential if we are to achieve those educational outcomes to which we and our students aspire. (Anson et al., 2012, 13).
Multimodal assessment is a very complex and confusing thing (the Sills article confused me a lot) as someone who has been in the media world…I personally think this article (sills, 2016) thinks too much and makes assessment a little harder than it needs to be. My rubric for my students documentary films have the following categories:
Genre Knowledge- Is the object a documentary with all the expected conventions of the documentary genre?
Research Integration- Is there sufficient and well-evaluated primary and secondary research present? Is the integration smooth and continue the logical line of the overall film’s argument?
Argumentation/Critical thinking- Is there a central argument within the presentation of research and information? Are the filmmakers analyzing each source and connecting it to the main argument in a logical sensible way?
Organization- Does this film have the standard documentary organization? Is there a clear narrative structure to it akin to the structures in documentary films?
Grammatical Proficiency- Are all typed lower thirds, titles, credits, objects, etc. spelled, punctuated, and grammatically correct?
I then assign point values to each section and grade thusly after watching the film a couple of times and providing lengthy feedback on how this could be edited to be ready for a more formal film festival.
I am very happy I spent this week researching this subject. I think taking my previous instruction in creative writing, and everything I learned from this course will help me develop a fair and valuable assessment philosophy for creative works. I think for creative writing having e-portfolios would be the best take. I think I would want either one class working on a longer work throughout the semester and submitting drafts to their eportfolio to see their progress and learn from their editorial history; or a course focused on shorter pieces to be placed in an eportfolio. I would have assignments catered to various learning outcomes such as time, location, dialogue, description, etc. I also would always include a reflective creating statement as it will help writers reflect upon their own developing style. I do really hope to teach creative writing sometime in the future. I think with my education here I would benefit a writing program very well by fostering community instead of stoking hyper competitivity, a problem faced a lot in the creative writing world which I hate. I want to help make writers who feel like they have people to lean on, people to help them edit, and one which has a foundation of trust. I want to make writers who aren’t afraid of taking risks with their writing and try new different things. Getting out of their comfort zones and creating great works. I felt it so much in this last class I taught in our creative units and my students even wrote to me how much they loved these units and feel like they have grown a lot. They told me to keep teaching creative writing it was a very touching last class session where I started to tear up. I was so nervous to teach these units. It felt really empowering to get that feedback and then to see the amazing publishable work my students created. I really hope I will be able to find a job that will allow me to teach all of my areas of knowledge and skills. I’m not sure where it will be but I hope it is out there.
I do also think holistic grading is important with the creative writing but we need that rubric with the scores because if too holistically, it is too hard to assess the validity or reliability of the creative writing assessment which is why there is this huge of an issue doing it.
References
Anson, C. M., Dannels, D. P., Flash, P., & et al. (2012). Big rubrics and weird genres: The futility of using generic assessment tools across diverse instructional contexts. Journal of Writing Assessment, 5(1), pp. 1-15.
Blomer, Y. (2011). Assessment in creative writing. Wascana Review 43, pp. 61-73.
May, S. (2007). Doing Creative Writing. Routledge.
Newman, J. (2007). The evaluation of creative writing at M.A. level (UK), In S, Earnshaw (ed.), The Handbook of Creative Writing. Edinburg University Press, pp. 24-36.
Sills, E. (2016). Multimodal assessment as disciplinary sensemaking: Beyond rubrics to frameworks. Journal of Writing Assessment, 9(2), pp. 1-9.
Freiman, M. (2 October 2002). Learning through dialogue: Teaching and assessing creative writing online. TEXT, 6(2).
Mozaffari, H. (December 2013). An analytical rubric for assessing creativity in creative writing. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(12), pp.2214-2219.
Reading Response 1/26 On a Scale ch. 1-3- Rachel's Thoughts on Standardized Testing/ The History of Assessment Part One.
In the beginning of higher education, professors were not typically the same as educators. Most were experts in their field meant to lecture their knowledge to students who took their courses. They were not trained to be educators, were not liable for helping their students to learn or improve their skills/abilities, just for giving knowledge.
Originally colleges were institutions for discovery and research, not for the granting of degrees so people could get professions. Just for academic scholars. “whether philologist or psychologist, the place for practice was the university, and the idea of that place was newly forming: it was to be the center of an ardent, methodical, independent search for truth in any and all of its forms” (Elliot, 2008, p. 8).
Gatekeepers, all white wealthy men oblivious to people of other colors or genders or wealth statuses, working at universities all had to decide how to predict a person’s success level while attending college. They decided what would measure intelligence and created problematic standardized exams. (Though in my opinion all standardized exams still are problematic as not every person has the same educational opportunities, tools, or access as every other person in America and it’s actually the worst in Illinois as of 2018. (The Education Trust,2018, https://stateofeducationfunding.org/).
The gatekeepers struggled over deciding how to evaluate writing and what is “good” writing, and what should be taught to create good knowledgeable writers. A connection to literacy was made, and institutions created various literary canons that students had to read.
The Gatekeepers decided to draft people to be examined, this time drafting from the armed forces and included both white and black men. Because these Gatekeepers were oblivious to the lives of other people they decided their tests were standardized and thus would get results that would be foolproof. They put people into groups of literate and illiterate equating this to their overall knowledge without recognizing the lack of equitable access to education. Thus they believed that white people were more intelligent, thank goodness people saw that this was deeply flawed, “without a standard definition of literacy, statistics of literacy were meaningless” (Elliot, 2008, p. 65).
The SAT was created and implemented, was made sure to be systematized (p. 75).
Committees helped to decide how to assess writing and had even more debate over how to accurately and standardized. Whether to let students choose between different subjects or write on what they were already knowledgeable about (p. 103-4). They decided having multiple qualified people assessing the exams would be best and created a rubric of sorts so readers could form some kind of consensus (p. 107-11) and the scale of A to F was created.
These tests and decisions then of course effected pre-college education as now educators had to prepare their students for an exam. Something that would eventually be made worse by the No Child Left Behind Act that led to awful things like educators solely teaching to pass a test and nothing more, which has caused this reader migraines since 2004. First as a student taking those tests then as an educator facing students who had been taught to write for a test and not actual writing outside of the ACT/SAT.
This reading helped me realize further that gatekeepers have been ruining education since its beginning and have been narrow-minded and oblivious to the fact that their decisions would effect people generations later. This also led me to connect to another book on writing composition I had read Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students 1865-1911 which shows how these type of decisions affected these marginalized communities. As someone whos ancestors directly were affected (Blackfoot Nation/Potawatomi Nation) and still sees in my family a negative view of education, a belief that they are less than in school, and trauma from trying to take people’s identities away and make them conform to a standard and to be like the gatekeepers (assimilation) in order to be successful in this country, these chapters just infuriated me and reminded me of the need to reform the educational system.
References
Elliot, N. (2008). On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America. Peter Lang,
Enoch, J. (2008). Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911. Southern Illinois University Press.
The Education Trust. (2018). “The State of Funding Equity Data Tool.” State of Education Funding.Org, Retrieved from: https://stateofeducationfunding.org/. Accessed On: 26 January 2023.
Reading Response 2/2 On a Scale ch. 4-6- Rachel's Thoughts on Standardized Testing/ The History of Assessment Part Two.
Edith Huddleston with her question of “what is the ability to write?” and found a connection between verbal ability and writing.
In 1956 the Advanced Placement Program (AP Classes) were created, its purpose “to encourage superior preparation of college candidates in the secondary schools by providing a method whereby able students with superior training can demonstrate their proficiency and quality for advanced placement” (Elliot, 2008, p. 153).
Swineford in her work with the AP Programs discovered a “halo effect” in the tests a term meaning “those giving ratings were ;apparently affected by a marked tendency to think of the person in general as rather good or rather inferior and to color the judgements of the qualities by this general feeling” Which I take to mean the graders of the AP tests saw the students as superior, those good, and that led to better scores overall which did benefit the program. I as an AP student however would like to note that among students, it led to a competitive attitude in the classroom, extra stress, a sense of early elitism in the school, and I found the AP exam awful for measuring ability and knowledge as I am a horrible test taker, but my homework and projects for classes were great. I got a 3 in most of my AP exams, 2s at times; but As and Bs in the subject.
I really found this quote from Allan Nairn profound and important, “the underlying fact is inescapable the ETS test system causes many individuals painful upheavals. Whenever widespread pain is inflicted on people, it is essential to ask why. It is important to keep in the forefront of any such inquiry the experience of victims” (p. 168).
Diederich as a functionalist lone wolf saw the potential of housewives to become good readers of exams, had them trained, and then they were used as professional readers.
Diederich developed the Measuring Growth in English handbook to help the program and create more reliable results
Alan C. Purves helped show and prove “one size does not fit all” (p. 198), and to give more attention to the disparity in English Education and testing.
Purves and his work in the IEA had designed a domain system for classifying composition assignments along, “instruction, stimulus, cognitive demand, purpose, role, audience, content, rhetorical specifications, tone, advanced preparation, length, format, time, draft, and criteria” (p. 199-200).
Breman in his work found a way by using undergraduate papers to train graduate students in holistic grading (my preferred grading method), “in a culture of flux, students would negotiate their ideas in essays, and their instructors would assess the essay’s value on its own terms by means of holistic scoring. The gap between pragmatism and postmodernism had been bridged” (p. 242).
This weeks reading showed the further evolution of English education, testing, and scoring. It showed that in order to get where we are a lot of people doing a lot of different things, serving in committees, bringing different views, seeing that it is something to constantly be updating and changing with the changing world; and helped show me how important that is. Sometimes…(while yes I have served on committees and currently am on the FYCC committee, and have worked on that, the text book program one, and the MCLMM one) as a graduate student I feel its just another professionalization hurdle to get done in order to land that tenure faculty position, busy work. I thought it was ok but not direly important. These chapters changed my mind. It is very important! It helps bring change that can really improve things for future students and it led to my favorite assessment practice, holistic grading. We need to be participating in these committees so we can create the change we want to see. Even if we only change a few things they create ripples that create waves that then become the evolution of English Education and Writing Assessment.
References
Elliot, N.(2005). On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America. Peter Lang.
Reading Response 3/9 On Reframing Assessment. Rachel's Thoughts on Impact of Assessment.
Writing assessment is crucial to our departments, our campuses, and our country. As Adler-Kessnery & O’Neil (2010) state, "they affect everything about our courses and programs—who is admitted to them; how they are taught; how students, courses, and instructor(s) are evaluated; what counts as valuable in them—in essence, everything that motivates writing instructors the way we do" (p. 4).
They affect our country because it is our job to prepare students to have the life they want in our country. Which especially now that the BA/BS degree is becoming the new High School Diploma as almost every job requires some form of post-grad degree. If we don’t prepare them, if we don’t teach them the skills they will be using their whole life, they might not succeed in life as a citizen in our country and have a stable income. There is a lot on our shoulders. Assessment can help us see how we are doing, if things need to be added to our curriculum, classes added or taken off the curriculum, etc.
I don’t know if I agree with anyone’s definition of being a citizen and what it means in Adler-Kessnery & O'Neil 100%, but the closest would probably be Labaree’s whose view is, “what would be required, instead, was a collective social emphasis on the kind of individuation, tracking, and fulfillment of economic need that was previously associated primarily with individual achievement”(p. 23).
We need to view the individual citizen as a part of the fabric of society. Everyone is a part of our country, everyone is an individual with unique skill sets and strengths/weaknesses. Everyone, even those who are typically not viewed by society as ‘contributive’ like those with disabilities or neurodiverse folks or those who did not receive a good k-12 education, deserves the chance to have a good life here. Thus in our classrooms and assessments we need to think of all these different lenses so we can do right by our students. It is our job and we are accountable for their writing skills, sure they have to put in the work and actually turn things in, but it is our job to teach them the tools and skills they can utilize in any written or composed genre.
I 100% agree and champion that writing departments need to collaborate outside of their own programs with the whole institution and community at large, and we need to “practice and teach what we preach” by showing the importance of collaboration in our classrooms. I posit that we evaluate our student's collaboration skills by adding (at least I do in my classroom) a group project evaluation or peer-review feedback; some kind of document that shows the act of collaboration. There are so many jobs that require us to work together, life requires us to work together to survive as we are social beings; not everyone takes a business 101, engineering, media writing, or other collaboration heavy course. They do have to take first year composition most times and this is an opportunity where collaborative writing and navigating team work can be implemented. I would want my classrooms to explore identity, how your identity works as part of a group/team (true colors) (identity circles), and build communities within the classroom, and actively have opportunities for collaboration.
I’ve appreciated and aligned with Bean since I read his book Engaging Ideas in my masters and I loved his approach to portfolio assessment wherein he built alliances with colleagues across campus and got their input on what was important to them (p. 128-9).
This reading also makes me think that students should have to have senior level writing and communication courses, and also a course on collaborative writing to be well-rounded and well prepared for the world outside of higher education. I also think that multimodal literacy and composition skills should be considered in education and assessment. The world is getting more and more multimodal, and being media literate is crucial given the advent of ‘fake news’ we need to prepare and train our students to analyze media for rhetoric and content, see things more dialectically and educate them how to discuss things more civilly than we have been exposed to by the media and our families. Perhaps an assignment wherein they have to collaborate, analyze, deconstruct, create a dialog about, identify, and then come to their own individual conclusions about a current event or discourse, and add that to e-portfolios would be a good thing to do.
E-portfolios are amazing and the way NIU does assessment is really amazing and I will keep it with me wherever I go and champion it in other departments.
This week’s reading really made me appreciate how NIU does writing assessment via eportfolios. I love that we have scores and broad, yet important, categories those scores go into, and at the end have a holistic numbered grade. I like that we do this as a whole department every semester and I appreciate all the writing instructors and their classes have to participate. It keeps us accountable and all knowledgeable about what we are teaching in our classrooms and why. I do think we need to add media literacy and multimodality somewhere in it though as that is a pressing concern with “fake news”, social media, and democracy as a whole. Overall this reading really helped me to appreciate how we assess writing at NIU. I do see a need to reach out to other departments and collaborate with them so that we are teaching applicable things to each discipline and staying true to the university’s mission. Writing/Rhetoric may be the basis of education, but we need that base so that other branches can grow and thrive off from it.
For my individual philosophy I think this reading strengthens it and had me remember Bean as a person to add to my philosophy of assessment. E-portfolios are the strongest and most equitable way of assessing writing, with holistic scoring, and a score-based calibration system with different categories to be scored, and each category weighted equally (though I believe mechanics and grammar should be weighted less, I recognize other people in departments have differing philosophies than me). Revisions should be allowed and championed in putting forth of portfolios so students can see their improvement, we can see improvement, and writing as a process is championed. I also think that it should be the effort of all writing classes with consideration for other departments needs, and require all writing instructors to go through some sort of training/collaboration so that they recognize what we as a university are teaching and valuing in writing.
References
Adler-Kassner, L. & O’Neil, P. (2010). Reframing Writing Assessment, Utah State University Press.
Bean, J. C. (2011). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd Edition, Josey-Bass.
Reading Response 3/23- E-Portfolio Learning Rachel's Thoughts on E-portfolios and Assessing Them.
The eight critical issues for eportfolios and student success are: defining learning outcomes, understanding your learners, identifying stakeholders, designing learning activities, using rubrics to evaluate eportflios, anticipating external uses of evidence, Including multiple forms of evidence, and evaluating the impact of e-portfolios (Penny Light et al, 2012, p. 1-2)
In e-portfolios everything needs a clear pedagogical purpose as these need to be substantial, not just showy. This is also important because as a metric it really does promote writing-as-process, and raises equity with its rubric of goals and holistic impressions. If at a program that does not implement eportfolios, one must prove its usefulness; therefore when making one you have to follow the eight critical issues closely and keep pedagogy in mind. (p. 3).
“The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has developed a set of essential learning outcomes that are particularly useful for initially thinking through [the eportfolio] process. These outcomes include:
Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world which can occur in the study of sciences and mathematics, social sciences, humanities, histories, languages, and the arts.
Intellectual and practical skills which include things like inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, and effective communication skills
Personal and social responsibility including things like civic knowledge and engagement and ethical reasoning and action
Integrated and applied learning, which includes synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general and specialized skills. (p. 45-46).
I know our discipline likes the word “stakeholders,” I personally always just imagine a bunch of old men with monocles in tuxedos or general crazy rich people because of the films Rat Race and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World but I digress. Stakeholders in our discipline, “represent the audiences for the individual eportfolios. Potential stakeholders include internal audiences, such as students, faculty, instructors, administrators, and other senior leaders, technical support staff, and administrative support staff, as well as external audiences such as alumni, employers, mentors, peers, and family members. The role of the stakeholders is a critical one, particularly in determining which factors and resources are necessary to ensure that the implementation is successful” (p. 51). My confusion here is how is the list of stakeholders this extensive in eportfolios? I understand we shape our program to better the lives of our students post college, therefore shaping our outcomes (one of the 8) and learning activities (another of the 8); our progress can benefit our departments, get us additional funding, better paychecks, more resources, etc. so I see more of the stakeholders making sense. But is its reach really as big as to include this entire list of stakeholders? I am confused about that.
In discussing “good” reflections, “Much of the discussion comes down to how to design and craft a reflective prompt that leads to deeper and more meaningful reflections, rather than superficial and cliché comments that may be wordy and verbose, but reveal little about what students actually learned” (p. 81) it continues to list taboo phrases in reflections. My question is though we already have so much to teach in a semester most of us leave this with like a week of classes left; everyone is burnt out and tired including us instructors. How do we get a good quality reflection? Would implementing reflections with every project and grading them help? How do we make them care about this and not see it as another box to check off/busy work?
Capstone projects for end/mid of degree, can we integrate the idea of a capstone project for individual classes that encompasses everything a student should learn in a semester? I do for my 203, unsure on one for my 103 or literatures courses. How can we create capstone projects?
How would one start to implement this at an institution that did not do it? Form/join a committee?
This reading seems to be what we have been working towards in this class. We have learned the problematic approaches of the past and now see that eportfolios are the current best, most equitable, fair, and tech integrative assessment measure. The question then becomes how I want to individually implement them in my future career post NIU. I already think I want to add a way so my students can edit their drafts for it to show them the importance of revision rather than just adding one of the previous things on at the end of the semester. I want to find a process that won’t seem like busy work or just a box to tick off at the end of the semester, as that was what I felt about assessment before this course. I didn’t fully understand its importance other than keeping us all teaching the right things. So how do we keep it important, interesting, and show our burnt out colleagues it’s a really good thing we do it here?
References
Penny Light, T., Chen, H.L., & Ittleson, J.C. (2012). Documenting Learning with ePortfolios. John Wiley & Sons.