RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
1
Restructuring the Writing Program at Berkeley City College
Or
How We Learned to Love Assessment and Use it to Improve Student Learning
Jennifer Lowood
Berkeley City College
Author Note
The author is Jennifer Lowood, Assessment Coordinator and English Department
Co-Chairperson at Berkeley City College, as well as a graduate of the first Assessment
Leadership Academy sponsored by WASC.
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
2
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “Once the mind has been expanded, it will
never again return to its original size.” As teachers, we like to think of this maxim in
relation to our students’ learning. In the writing program at Berkeley City College, we
have learned to apply it to ourselves as teachers; through program assessment, we
discovered that our thinking about what our students could do was limited, and we
learned, with both humility and excitement, to apply what we had learned in order to
revamp our program and thereby help our students succeed.
In spring, 2011, we in the Berkeley City College (BCC) writing program
embarked on our first portfolio-based program assessment. This assessment process
guided us down paths we never expected; it changed the way we think about how we can
best help our students learn and progress to be successful writers and students, and
consequently it led to a drastic redesign of our writing program. The process brought us
together as colleagues and gave us tools for continuing to analyze and refine our work; it
led us to challenge our assumptions and continually refine our processes for the good of
our students.
In designing our first portfolio assessment, we began (of course) by looking at our
program learning outcomes, according to which students completing this program would
be able to
-
write effective, well organized, well developed, well edited, logically sound,
clear essays
-
write effective, well edited, well organized research papers of 3,000-5,000
words which apply appropriate and clear organizational strategies
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
-
3
apply active reading strategies in order to identify main ideas and critically
analyze and explain ideas in texts
We determined that the most efficient way to assess the degree to which students were
achieving these learning outcomes was to assess student portfolios, each one consisting
of a summary of a college-level reading, an in-class essay written in response to a
common prompt, and a research paper. Since our pre-transfer English and ESL
composition/reading classes were intended to prepare students for freshman composition
classes, we decided to ask all students taking freshman composition and all students in
pre-transfer composition classes to participate in the portfolio assessment. The entire
department, consisting of English and ESL teachers, participated in scoring the portfolios
of all students enrolled in these classes, applying a rubric of our design. Readers were
normed, all portfolios were scored twice, and portfolio readers were not aware of the
identity or course level of portfolios’ authors, nor did they have access, in each case, to
the scores of the other reader. Each discrepancy was resolved by a third reader. We
determined that the portfolio assessment would double as a culminating assignment for
students, as well as a tool for program assessment.
The first assessment yielded the first set of unexpected results in the area of
research skills. We weren’t surprised to find that pre-transfer students didn’t perform
well in terms of research skills, but we were dismayed to discover that the students in
freshman composition didn’t fare as well as we had hoped they would. As we discussed
possible reasons for this, we noted that students in the classes leading up to freshman
composition did not practice research skills and that, even in freshman composition
classes, students wrote only one research paper at the end of the term. We saw for the
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
4
first time that we were asking students to learn a critical and difficult academic skill, but
only giving them one opportunity to practice that skill. This led to our first program
change. We decided that we would have students in freshman composition classes write
two short research papers instead of one long one and, in a more radical move, that
students in pre-transfer English and ESL classes would also write two short research
papers. Many teachers in the writing program were nervous about how to accomplish
this, considering the other demands of writing classes, but because we were committed to
helping students learn this critical skill, a small group of interested faculty began working
on curriculum redesign to help guide instructors in successfully making the change.
In addition, the first assessment yielded an even more surprising – and ultimately
more significant – set of results. At the time of the first assessment, the BCC writing
program offered a writing class one level below freshman composition and another class
two levels below, as is typical of writing programs in California. As mentioned
previously, all students enrolled in pre-transfer classes submitted portfolios, along with
students in freshman composition courses. As we had expected, there was a notable gap
in performance between the students in freshman composition and the other students.
However, to our surprise, the students in the course two levels below freshman
composition achieved scores almost as high as those in the course one level below. In
fact, 90.3% of the students in the course two levels below freshman composition would
have earned a C or better on the portfolio in the class one level below, according to the
grading standards we set for that class level, and 40.4% would have earned an A or B.
Many of us were aware of the statewide research that has indicated that students who
begin their college careers taking English classes several levels below transfer do not
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
5
tend to complete the transfer-level course.1 To add to this, our portfolio results, involving
over 500 students each semester, indicated clearly that most of our students who began
taking English classes two levels below transfer would have been able to succeed if they
had been placed in a higher level course.
There was one more significant and unpredictable (or at least unpredicted) result
from our first portfolio assessment. We learned that “basic skills” students were capable
of learning the types of research and rhetorical skills that we had mistakenly assumed we
shouldn’t be teaching them – though they slightly lagged behind other students in terms
of mechanics and clarity. We had collectively assumed that we would be setting them up
for failure if we taught research and rhetorical skills at the same level as in freshman
composition. We learned that we had been wrong, and we immediately acted to correct
our mistake.
Our first step, in addressing the results of the portfolio assessment, was to bolster
the teaching of research in all of our classes. Together, as a department, we designed a
model curriculum, a semester-long schedule that would allow students to learn the skills
in reading, writing, and research reflected in our student learning outcomes. Instructors
knew that they were not required to adhere to the schedule, as long as they met the basic
requirements in the course outline and taught the SLOs. However, most instructors in
freshman composition, as well as pre-transfer composition and reading classes, adopted
the model schedule; all took responsibility for addressing the SLOs and agreed to include
at least two research papers in their assignments.
1
See Exponential Attrition and the Promise of Acceleration in Developmental English
and Math by Katie Hern.
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
6
When we realized that we had been holding our students back unnecessarily and
that students could have – and clearly should have -- learned the rhetorical and research
skills that would be most useful to them in their academic careers, we designed a new
course that we hoped would ultimately replace the one two levels below transfer. This
course mirrored the freshman composition class and added a lab component in a
computer lab setting, to be staffed by the instructor and three instructional assistants; in
this course, students received individualized instruction and support so that they could
successfully edit and proofread their work.
The results of the next portfolio assessment, structured in the same way as the
first, were so striking that we felt that we needed to collect data for another semester to
confirm them; students in the new class, though they would previously have been placed
two levels below freshman composition, significantly outperformed students who had
been placed into the class one level below. We held back on sharing our results widely
until we had had a chance to see whether they would be duplicated. They have, however,
been duplicated consistently for three semesters. Most recently, in spring, 2012, the
average score in all skill areas for all portfolios in freshman composition (transfer level)
was 81.61. The average score in the class one level below transfer was 63.48. The
average score in the new, experimental class (for students who would have been placed
two levels below transfer) was 70.44. This mirrored the results from the previous two
semesters. Notably, the students in this class performed well in the skill areas in which
we thought “basic skills students” could not be successful – research and rhetorical skills.
As a result of these findings, we have replaced all “basic skills” classes with this newly
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
7
designed class, which mirrors freshman composition but adds three hours of lab time with
imbedded instructional support.
But that’s not all. As we continued to develop our curriculum, we noticed another
interesting change. In our first administration of the portfolio assessment (Spring 2011),
the top 7% of scorers were exclusively students in freshman composition. In the most
recent administration (Spring 2013), of the top 7% of scorers, 10% were students in the
newly designed class, and 2% were in the class one level below English 1A. Of the
students who would have earned an A in the portfolio if they were in freshman
composition (the top 20%), 17% (24 out of 139) were in basic skills and ESL classes. 2
This led us to question whether students who have already shown that they would have
earned an A in the culminating project in freshman composition should be required to
repeat the work of that class. We are currently developing an alternative approach to
freshman composition for these students, a “competency-based” class which allows
students to focus on skills they need to master, as indicated by portfolio assessment
results, without having to repeat work unnecessarily.
The scope of this essay does not allow for a discussion of all of the aspects of our
work which have surprised us and others. For example, the English department and ESL
department have worked closely throughout the portfolio process; this has led to changes
in ESL curriculum, as well as English curriculum, and it has led to fruitful discussions
concerning ways in which our curricula can effectively dovetail. As in our English
curriculum, the ESL curriculum has changed in order to allow for instruction in research
2
One of the more surprising and significant statistics that emerged from the latest
assessment is that, while 5.75% of the students who completed the portfolio assessment
were in the new course, the percentage of these students among those who would have
earned an A if they were enrolled in freshman composition was 5.76% .
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
8
strategies, and students in the newly developed advanced ESL reading and writing class
have performed very well in relation to those students in freshman composition, as have
their counterparts in pre-transfer English classes.
In addition to all of the curriculum changes previously mentioned, our assessment
process has led to the development of a rubric relating to writing, reading, and research
skills, which is now ubiquitous among not only teachers but students in English and ESL
classes. Students in this program know what skills they aim to achieve, and if they move
from one level to the next, they have a realistic sense of their accomplishments, as well as
the skills which they will work to improve.
Future projects which have emerged as a result of analyzing our findings include
the development of a website we can use to share materials and a joint project with one of
our librarians to help us determine what we mean by “academically acceptable” sources.
Through the portfolio assessment process in the writing program at Berkeley City
College, we’ve learned to question our assumptions concerning students’ capabilities;
we’ve come together as English and ESL teachers with a common purpose and direction;
and together, we’ve significantly restructured – and will continue to restructure – our
program.
RESTRUCTURING THE WRITING PROGRAM AT BERKELEY CITY
COLLEGE
References
Hern, Katie. (2010, June). Exponential attrition and the promise of acceleration in
developmental English and math. Retrieved from
http://www.rpgroup.org/resources/accelerated-developmental-english-and-math
9