Ibrahim Gardner
Assessing student writing is a critical component of pedagogy and curriculum. Teachers must provide opportunities for writing and encouragement for students to write. They must also promote student success by monitoring writing to identify strengths and weaknesses, teaching specific skills, and giving constructive feedback. Various strategies can be employed to improve student writing skills, such as peer assessment, self-assessment, and focusing on specific lenses or aspects of writing. Additionally, criteria for student success should be fair, consistent, public, and clear, with feedback aimed at coaching revision and growth.
| Characteristics | Values |
|---|---|
| Student writing evaluation factors | Fluency, content, conventions, syntax, and vocabulary |
| Purpose of assessment | Identifying strengths and weaknesses, planning instruction, evaluating instructional activities, giving feedback, monitoring performance, and reporting progress |
| Teacher's responsibility | Provide opportunities for writing and encouragement, promote student success, monitor student writing, teach specific skills and strategies, and give feedback |
| Criteria for student success | Fair, consistent, public, and clear |
| Feedback | Coach revision and growth |
| Inclusive assessment | Transparency, flexibility, alignment among learning goals, central task, evaluation criteria, and linguistic justice |
| Writing for a complex, multifaceted audience | Communicating ideas to a heterogeneous and educated but uninformed audience |
| Self and peer assessment | Students score essays, their own, and those of their peers |
| Writing assessment model | Ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation |
| Peer editing | Compliments, suggestions, and corrections |
| Assessment lenses | Organization, elaboration, voice, and grammar |
| Writing assessment framework | To persuade, to explain, and to convey experience |
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What You'll Learn
Peer assessment
Involve Students in the Criteria Development:
Student familiarity with the assessment criteria enhances the validity of peer assessment. Involve students in discussions about the criteria and consider their input when creating the rubric. This ensures that the evaluation guidelines are clear and accessible to all.
Break Down Assignments:
Large and complex assignments can be intimidating for students. To facilitate peer assessment, consider breaking down larger assignments into smaller, manageable parts. For example, peers can provide feedback on the assignment outline, first draft, and subsequent drafts. This incremental approach encourages collaboration and allows for feedback at various stages of the writing process.
Provide Clear Guidelines and Rubrics:
Design guidelines or rubrics with clearly defined tasks for the reviewer. Introduce these rubrics through learning exercises to ensure students understand how to apply them effectively. Clear guidelines help maintain consistency in the assessment process and enable students to provide structured feedback to their peers.
Model Constructive Criticism:
As an instructor, you can guide students in offering appropriate, constructive criticism to their peers. Model descriptive feedback and demonstrate how to provide feedback that focuses on both form and content. This will help students learn to give meaningful and respectful critiques that promote growth.
Incorporate Small Feedback Groups:
Organize small feedback groups where students can discuss their written comments with the assignment's author. These groups provide a safe and collaborative environment for clarifying feedback, addressing concerns, and promoting meaningful discussions about the writing process.
Focus on Individual Growth:
Encourage students to view peer assessment as an opportunity for self-improvement rather than competition. Help them understand their development relative to their past performance. This shift in perspective fosters a growth mindset and encourages students to learn from their peers.
By incorporating these strategies, peer assessment can become a valuable tool for improving writing skills and critical thinking in early university writing courses.
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Fluency, content, conventions, syntax, and vocabulary
Fluency, in the context of writing, refers to how smoothly, happily, and quickly a student can write without needing to pause to think about how to form letters or encode/spell words. It is influenced by a mix of skills, such as encoding/spelling, handwriting, working memory, attention, and motivation. Skilled writers tend to write longer passages of text without needing to pause, compared to less skilled writers. This is linked to how well they can translate their thoughts into words and how quickly they can get them down on paper.
When assessing student writing in early university, it is important to evaluate the content. Content refers to the words that go into a document, and effective content writing involves creating relevant and engaging content for a target audience. This may involve promoting a brand or business. In an educational context, content may be evaluated based on how well it meets the assignment's requirements, the quality of ideas presented, and the effectiveness of the structure.
Conventions in writing are the linguistic rules that make a text understandable and meaningful to the reader. These include spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and consistent formatting. For instance, in English, words are spelled according to their dictionary definitions, and correct punctuation and grammar help convey the intended meaning of sentences.
Syntax refers to the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. Small changes in word order can significantly impact the meaning of a sentence. For example, when a sentence uses a direct object and an adverbial complement, the direct object comes first, followed by the adverbial complement. Understanding the rules of syntax is essential for writers who want to convey shifts in meaning through sentence structure.
Vocabulary pertains to the choice and use of words in writing. Assessing vocabulary involves evaluating the variety, appropriateness, and effectiveness of the words students use in their writing. This includes the use of precise and descriptive language, as well as the ability to vary sentence structure and word choice to create interest and clarity for the reader.
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Grading and feedback
Grading Considerations:
- Fair and Consistent Criteria: Criteria for evaluating student writing should be fair, consistent, public, and clear. Transparency in grading practices is essential, and educators should avoid idiosyncratic criteria that may seem eccentric to students.
- Complementary Pedagogy: Grading practices should complement the pedagogy and curriculum. This requires advance preparation and thoughtful planning.
- Inclusive Assessment: Instead of using assessment as a gatekeeping tool, instructors should aim for inclusivity by supporting student development in writing. This includes considering flexibility, linguistic justice, and alignment between learning goals, tasks, and evaluation criteria.
- Competency-Based Assessment: Consider implementing a pass/fail grading system, where students receive feedback and options for revision or dropping assignments that do not meet specifications. This approach focuses on cumulative labour or effort rather than stepped-down grades.
Feedback Strategies:
- Focus on One Lens: Instead of getting overwhelmed by focusing on multiple aspects of writing simultaneously, try evaluating student work through a single lens at a time. For example, you might focus solely on organization during one review pass and then switch to another lens, such as elaboration or voice, on the next pass. This approach prevents you from providing feedback on very narrow parts of the writing and helps students develop more holistically as writers.
- Student Self and Peer Assessment: Encourage students to assess their own writing and that of their peers. This can be done through pair work or small group discussions. Self and peer assessment help students develop metacognitive skills, a deeper understanding of their writing, and the ability to provide constructive feedback.
- Critical Learning Opportunity: Share the work of assessing writing assignments with your students. This not only reduces the burden on the instructor but also creates a critical learning opportunity for students to learn from each other's feedback and suggestions.
- Feedback as Engagement: Remember that feedback is where students feel most vulnerable. Your feedback should engage with their ideas, acknowledge their efforts, and coach them toward revision and growth in their current and future work.
- Incorporate Rubrics and Checklists: Utilize rubrics and checklists to streamline the feedback process and provide clear guidelines for students. Single-point rubrics, for example, can help you focus on one specific aspect of the writing at a time.
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Transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity
Transparency
To ensure transparency, it is important to establish clear and consistent criteria for student success. This includes sharing with students the specific expectations for their writing assignments. For example, using a rubric or checklist that outlines the required elements, such as organization, voice, grammar, and content. This helps students understand exactly what they need to do to succeed and makes the assessment process transparent and fair.
Accessibility
Making assessments accessible involves providing opportunities for students to develop their writing skills and encouraging their attempts. This can be done by offering a variety of writing assignments, such as quick writes, compositions, literary responses, and essays. Additionally, providing resources and support, such as writing workshops or writing centres, can help students improve their writing and make the assessment process more accessible.
Inclusivity
Inclusive assessment goes beyond gatekeeping and instead focuses on supporting student development in writing. It involves considering the diverse backgrounds and experiences of students and ensuring that the assessment is flexible and aligned with the learning goals. Inclusive assessment also promotes linguistic justice, recognising that not all students will perform in "standard" English. Encouraging students to write for a complex and multifaceted audience, rather than solely for the grader, can help foster inclusivity by valuing a range of ideas and perspectives.
Feedback and Revision
An essential aspect of upholding transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity is providing constructive feedback and opportunities for revision. Feedback should engage with students' ideas and acknowledge their efforts while also offering guidance for improvement. Allowing students to revise and resubmit assignments can help them develop their writing skills and understand the evaluation criteria better. This process of feedback and revision promotes transparency and inclusivity by providing a clear path for improvement and ensuring that all students have the opportunity to succeed.
Peer Assessment and Self-Assessment
Incorporating peer assessment and self-assessment can also enhance transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity. When students assess their own writing and that of their peers, they develop a deeper understanding of the assessment criteria and become more comfortable speaking about their writing. It also fosters a sense of inclusivity, as students learn from each other and provide diverse perspectives on writing. Additionally, it makes the assessment process more accessible by providing multiple sources of feedback and support.
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Writing for a complex audience
Writing is a complex skill to assess, especially in early university students. One of the main issues with in-school writing is that students often write for an audience of one—the person grading the assignment. This can result in students merely "parroting the grader's ideas back at them", rather than developing their own ideas and writing style.
To address this, teachers can encourage students to write for a complex, multifaceted audience. This can be a powerful way to help students develop their writing skills and improve their critical thinking. Instead of writing to impress, students should focus on communicating their ideas clearly and effectively to an educated but uninformed audience that is willing to be convinced.
When writing for a complex audience, it is important to keep the language simple, concise, and direct. Avoid jargon or complicated terminology that may be unfamiliar to readers outside your field. Positive wording is generally clearer and quicker to understand than negative wording. For example, "the rats were always sick" is clearer than "the rats were never healthy". It is also important to use active voice instead of passive voice. For instance, "I examined the patients" is clearer than "patients were examined".
Additionally, it is crucial to understand the reading level of your audience. While you want to avoid overly complex language, be careful not to oversimplify your writing. Find a balance between simplicity and sophistication. Use punctuation sparingly and only when necessary. While a thesaurus can help you spice up your vocabulary, bigger words are not always better. Your readers should not need a dictionary to understand your content.
Finally, encourage students to practice self and peer assessment. This can help them develop a more mature and introspective perspective on their writing. It is beneficial for students to score their own and their peers' essays, as it allows them to apply what they have learned and improve their writing skills independently.
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Frequently asked questions
Criteria for student success should be fair, consistent, public, and clear. It is important to promote transparency, accessibility, and inclusive pedagogy. Teachers should also be mindful that writing assignments are not a neutral component of students' experiences in class.
Using a rubric or a checklist can help to focus on one aspect of the writing at a time, such as organization, elaboration, voice, or grammar. This makes it easier to provide super-effective feedback.
Students can assess their own writing by working in pairs or small groups. Peer editing can help students to understand what parts of their writing are unclear and what parts an audience finds exciting.
