Illinois State University Writing Program
Assessing Writing at Illinois State University
Updated Fall 2014
In many ways the assignments in our program are in keeping with a Writing-About-Writing or a Genre
Studies model. While they differ from assignments typical of a traditional writing program pedagogy, they
are in sync with these newer models for creating more diverse writing situations. However, we think our
approach to two specific areas, “Uptake Genres” and “Alternative Classroom Assessment Practices,” are
the best illustration of the new directions we are exploring on making learning visible (and thus
potentially more transferable to diverse writing situations).
Alternative Classrooms Assessment Practices Examples: The following examples illustrate our focus on
teaching the skills of “learning how to learn how to write” rather than on producing writing that
demonstrates mastery. Our focus also has a strong impact on how assessment works in the classroom.
Example #1: “Assessing Learning through Multiple Measures”
While we cannot fully demonstrate our diverse range of classroom assessment practices, the following
excerpt from a course plan by Julie Bates (Ph.D. Student, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Grassroots Writing
Research Journal Associate Editor) illustrates how uptake genres are integrated fully into the formal
assessment and grading for the course:
ENG 101 Assessment Plan
This course emphasizes learning over mastery. In other words, it focuses on getting students to think
about and articulate their learning related to specific assignments in the course. Although students must
produce the kind of text the assignment requires, a key emphasis of each Investigation Portfolio is how
well students are able to articulate a clear understanding and knowledge of why the text needs to be
produced in certain ways and what exactly they did to create the appropriate text. In some cases,
students may get credit for knowing and articulating what should be done, even if they cannot yet do it as
well as they would like.
For each investigation, students must turn in an Investigation Portfolio that clearly shows the trajectory of
their project and what key skills and knowledge they have developed during the course of the
experiment. Each Investigation Portfolio must include the following four deliverables:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Skills & Knowledge Checklist—a document students work on throughout the semester (on their
personal wiki pages) in which new skills and knowledge learned within each investigation must
be clearly identified.
Field Notes—project notes (posted on their personal wiki pages), including all class notes,
research notes, assignments, and self-assessment materials related to the project; in particular,
students must make certain their field notes demonstrate the items listed on their Skills &
Knowledge Checklist (if they do not, their portfolios won’t be graded).
Genre Experiment—the actual writing/textual production (posted on their personal wiki pages,
unless the genre format does not allow this).
Genre Report—a researched document that explores students’ learning during the course of the
experiment, including their research process and the results of their genre experiment as well as
what they have learned about the genre they explored, written in the genre of a Grassroots
Writing Research Journal article (posted in Reggie Net1 for grading).
Because students will better understand what they help to build, students are actively engaged in the
decision-making process regarding creation of assignment requirements and scoring rubrics. For each
1 Reggie Net is ISU’s web-based learning and collaboration system.
Genre Experiment and Genre Report, the class will brainstorm in larger or small groups (depending on
assignment) a list of characteristics and conventions for that genre and will be tasked with collectively
coming up with the specific assignment sheet to accompany each Experiment and Report, with guidance
from the instructor as needed. In addition, the class will work together to identify specific requirements
and point totals for the scoring rubric for each Investigation (following point totals and guidelines set by
the instructor). Students will be encouraged to create assignment guidelines and scoring rubrics that are
based primarily on students’ ability to learn and to showcase their learning processes related to producing
textual artifacts and understanding how such artifacts are produced .
Example #2: “Genre Understanding Sheet for ENG 145.13”
This second example illustrates the type of work that all of our teachers expect from students as part of
the grading for various projects both our English 101 and our English 145 courses. The Genre
Understanding Sheet, developed by Rob Rowan (Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Teaching Assistant), asks
students to not simply “reflect” on what they learned, but to document the “how” of their learning.
Because it is part of a summative assessment, there is an expectation that students will be able to answer
questions about their work and the complex activities related to its production. For many teachers, similar
types of questions are infused throughout each unit of the course, working as both formative and
summative measures to assess the learning that is happening in the working lives of the writers, rather
than focusing on the production as the only (or even the primary) measure of learning.
English 145.13 – Robert M. Rowan
Fall 2013. Last Updated: 7/3/13
Genre Understanding Sheet (GUS)
The purpose of the GUS is to help you actively think about what you’re learning. You should be thinking
about these questions while you work on the assignment, not just at the end. Please fill out each of the
following sections in as much detail as possible. You must justify your answers (except the genre name)
with an explanation of how you arrived at that answer. Assume that “How do you know this?” is a part of
each question below.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
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9.
Genre Name: What is the genre called? (Name or brief description)
Writing Purpose: What is the business task you are trying to accomplish with this document?
Audiences: Who are your audiences for this business task and document? What do these
audiences want or need from this document?
Content: What is your content (the facts, figures, images, and details)? Discuss how (or if) this
genre is suitable for the task you are working on, the content you are trying to deliver, and the
audience you are trying to reach. If you deliberately break a genre’s conventions or expectations,
explain why and describe the results you wanted to achieve.
Research: Describe and document (list sources for) the genre and content research and other
knowledge-work you performed for the assignment in each of the areas below. You should also
include other attributes you may have researched. “I Googled it” is not sufficient – be more
thorough.
Trajectories: Examine the main trajectories of communication in this genre, including where it
originates, how it is produced, and how it will most likely be used.
Ethics: What ethical, legal, or cultural considerations did you take into account when working on
this assignment? “None” is the wrong answer. Ethical issues are often subtle and easy to
overlook (our assumptions can blind us here), but that does not make the issues less important.
Web Text: If you used text copied from the web for part of your assignment, where did you find
the text/item, what did you change, and what does your copied text mean?
Defining Characteristics: List and describe at least four defining characteristics of this genre—
attributes that, if they were changed too much, would turn the document into a different genre.
10. Self-Analysis: What made this genre easy or challenging for you to work with? What would you
do differently next time? Describe the other interesting traits, features, benefits, weaknesses, or
shortcomings (yours or the genre’s) that you observed while working in this genre.
11. Group contributions: Describe the content and research provided by each group member.
Example #3: “Grading Breakdowns”
One aspect of our program pedagogy, critical to our overall approach, is that a significant portion of a
student’s course grade reflects “proof-of-learning.” Although this strategy is enacted in different ways in
each classroom, its overall impact in our program is that our course grades are based on activities and
learning that extend beyond what can be seen through the student’s “Writing Experiment” (or “Object of
Production”). In this example document, written as a letter to her students, Michelle Wright Dottore
(Ph.D. Student, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Writing Program Professional Development Coordinator)
outlines how the grades for her course can be understood as a range of learning products, rather than as
a single “assignment” that students produce for a grade.
Dear Students,
So what does this list of learning objectives2 mean to you? Imagine yourself as a secret agent, part of an
alliance of rhetorical researchers and literary scientists whose mission is to see more fully all aspects of a
writing situation that influence how people use the tools of language and genre. This will incite us to look
not only at many specific forms of writing (its features, characteristics, and conventions) in a “real-life”
context (its situation), but also the functions of writing (goals, outcomes) by considering how and why it is
produced and the span of production within and by certain cultures. This study will require us to put on a
scientific lens, our scientist lab goggles in some instances, as we experiment with writing various genres
and, too, documenting and reflecting on those experiments. For example, if we were to experiment with
writing poetry, specifically the genre of Shakespearean sonnets, you would turn in:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Your experiment proposal (10% of your experiment grade)
Your experiment (and the actual sonnet) (10% of your experiment grade)
Your research lists, notes, journals (30% of your experiment grade)
A Proof-of-Learning document that outlines the “how” of learning for the entire experiment,
using citations and examples from the experiment and all of your other notes, journals, research
lists, in class activities, etc. (50% of your experiment grade)
As you can see, the actual writing experiment (as with the example above, the Shakespearean sonnet)
counts for only 10% of your overall grade while the pre-writing, documenting, sharing of the experiment
counts for 90%. Now I realize, this may be different from your past writing/English classes where you
were asked to write a particular thing, like an essay, and were given a topic of research and a rubric
and/or model on how to do it, which you followed, completed, and turned it in to be graded by your
mastery of the isolated assignment. Over. Done.
Here, however, you are free to go further, taking those valuable skills you have learned in prior classes
and using them to get inside the process (inside activities systems, inside genres), asking how and why
writing functions in various rhetorical and social contexts. You will begin to see writing as a dynamic,
social action and to analyze and talk about what you saw, experienced, and learned in doing so. Your
success/grade here is not about your mastery to reproduce (who are masters anyway?) but rather about
the thoroughness of your research and reflections as you experiment with various writing situations.
2 Please see Appendix I for our program’s Learning Outcomes.