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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007GWingardSession H. 5: “Assessing Freshman Composition and WAC Programs: Three Studies of Student Writing”
Reviewed by Joel Wingard The presenters were four faculty from different campuses in the City University of New York system: Baruch College, La Guardia Community College, and City College. Each campus and the entire system had some kind of assessment project under way with regard to first-year writing. The session chair said the guiding question for the panelists was how to effect change in a long-standing (if not ossified) first-year comp program where no assessment had been done. The several assessments that were reported on would, it was hoped, contribute to a new, comprehensive assessment that would drive curricular revision. But at the moment, she said, CUNY campuses were still reacting to curricular change initiated from above in the form of the elimination of all remedial courses in the system. The first presenter and chair reported on a comparative study of student writing in a required general education at City College: a Music 101 course in spring semester 2004. The objects of the study were to see how readers outside of English evaluate student writing and to judge the benefits of close collaboration between graduate student writing fellows and subject-area instructors. So in half the sections of Music 101 that semester, the instructors worked closely with a writing fellow for six weeks (“enriched” sections); in the other half they did not. A rubric was developed for rating student work on a concert-review assignment, with one sample group drawn from an enriched section and one from a ‘control’ section. The rubric’s criteria concentrated on ‘content’ related to the genre of the concert review, rather than generalized criteria of good writing. Papers were read by graduate faculty in music. Papers from the enriched section, it turned out, were rated more highly than those from the control section. Still, this raised the question of why: was it because of the intensive work between the writing fellow and the course instructor? That was unknown. The next two speakers, both instructors at two-year colleges in the CUNY system (and one a sociologist, not a compositionist) reviewed the background and current findings of an assessment project conducted across both campuses, La Guardia CC being first- and second-years and Baruch being third- and fourth-years, especially focusing on Business and Economics. In the past, they had done what one presenter called “anecdotal assessment”: that is, they asked faculty if student writing improved from the beginning of a course to the end. Recognizing the inadequacy of that approach, they recently tried a more systematic job, looking at samples of student writing taken from pre- and post-course situations at LGCC. The first go-round showed nearly 67 percent improvement in student writing from one situation to the other. Next, they looked at student writing from consecutive semesters of WID courses at Baruch College. They were hoping to see if the more intensive nature of the second-semester course improved student writing. They found “a statistically significant change” in the sample from the first and second semesters, suggesting that the instructor intervention was actually formative. The chair, acting as Respondent now, synthesized some “bigger issues” arising from these assessments. She suggested to the audience of about 75 that WPA’s not ask if WID courses produce “success,” but instead focus on why particular strategies worked or did not work For instance, while both recent assessments suggested “success,” neither one provided any information about students’ writing processes, which would seem to be relevant in trying to assess “improvement” in student writing. Comments? |