Assessment matters—The best of both worlds: Coupling research and assessment

Practical inquiry combines the formal research techniques of formulating questions and conducting literature reviews with site‐based data collection and use of findings to improve practice. Rochester Institute of Technology has used this approach to improve support for their residential students.     

Assessment matters—Trial,error, triumph: A college rethinks its core curriculum

When students and faculty alike rejected the College of Mount St. Joseph's revised core curriculum, no one dug in their heels to wait out the dissatisfaction.The entire campus engaged in a second round of good, hard discussions about scrapping the new for the newer.     

Assessment matters—Research and learning intensive: Bowling Green State University commits to both

Ten years ago, BGSU pledged to become the premier learning community in Ohio and one of the best in the nation. With campuswide agreement and widespread assessment, the institution has made gains and has a clear sense of what it needs to do next.     

Assessment matters—Integration,reflection, interpretation: Realizing the goals of a general education capstone course

For the past twenty‐three years, students at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona have benefited from a sequential, interdisciplinary general education program that culminates in a capstone course. A departmental culture focused on assessment enabled faculty members to examine this capstone experience and make changes that have substantially improved student learning.     

Assessment matters—Should improving student thinking include altering student values? The role of general education

Although educators sometimes wonder, students are thinking in their classes. Students' thinking is shaped by their values and attitudes. But should education be shaping the values and attitudes that shape student thinking?     

高中英语过程写作教学框架下的同伴互评

现阶段大部分高中英语写作课堂中都采取结果性教学的传统方式,沿用单一的教师评改的评价模式。随着过程教学法、合作学习、多元评价主体的提出与推崇,学生参与评价越来越得到提倡。本文论述了与其对立出现的作为过程教学法框架下的同伴评价模式,进一步提出了同伴互评在英语写作课堂实践的相关步骤及其优势与局限。     

Assessment: Comments from the assessment plan review process

The following is reprinted from the December 1992 issue of Briefing (vol. 10, no, 3, p. 8), published by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. North Central's Commission on Institutions of Higher Education approved a “Statement on Assessment and Student Academic Achievement” that in part expressed the expectation that “an institution has and is able to describe a program by which it documents student academic achievement.” After some experience in reviewing campus assessment plans, the panel members offered the following comments on what distinguishes good plans from not-so-good plans.     

Bottom line—What the building boom says about campus values

Critics claim that well‐appointed residence halls and fully loaded recreation centers are sending the wrong message to students about what college is for. The author argues that welcoming communal spaces are an important educational tradition     

Children writing: Multimodality and assessment in the writing classroom

Multimedia has had a widely recognised impact on society, but it is still under‐represented in the literacy pedagogies of many schools. This may relate to the way we view assessment for literacy, which is still almost wholly monomodal. Students assessed at a low level as producers of verbal text may respond positively when working multimodally, but the only assessment instruments we have do not reveal this. In a class of 26 ten‐year‐olds in Victoria, Australia, with rich access to computers, five children performed at a very low level when working with verbal expression only, but responded remarkably when invited to work multimodally. A programme of text production was monitored and the results analysed, progressing from handwritten monomodal work, through stages of multimodality to full multimodal expression. The results suggest strongly that some children need multimodal scaffolding in order to communicate complex ideas effectively. This, however, requires an acceptance of multimodal texts as part of the primary literacy curriculum. It is therefore suggested that assessment of multimodal composition, both narrative and other texts, should be developed to help teachers accept the value of introducing multimodal literacies into the classroom.     

浅谈过程体裁教学法与英语写作教学

"过程体裁法"是一种结合了"成果法"、"过程法"和"体裁法"的优点于一体的写作教学法,近年来,在我国英语写作教学领域"过程体裁法"得到了越来越多学者的关注。本文将过程体裁法中的一些相关概念,模式应用于英语写作教学,从而提高学生的英语写作能力。     

In practice—Distance learners: Welcome to campus!

When Old Dominion University created a summer institute to allow adult distance learning students to enroll in accelerated on‐campus courses, typical college transition issues were, at first, left off the schedule. Over the years, the institute has evolved to provide these students with the same kind of personal and academic support needed by their traditional‐age peers.     

Baseline assessment of writing: the need for reconsideration

This article questions the usefulness to teaching of items to be used in baseline assessment of writing in the UK. Current requirements for national baseline assessment are intended to serve two very different purposes: assessment for management and assessment for teaching. It is argued that this duality of purpose can threaten teaching and overemphasise assessment for management. This article describes a small study investigating items on the baseline assessment scale developed by the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA, 1997a), which suggests that the SCAA criteria for baseline assessment of writing need to be reconsidered. This reconsideration can be sought in the light of research and evidence of children’s achievements. Finally the paper concludes that there needs to be greater clarity of purpose and a redefinition of the misleading term ‘baseline assessment’.     

Supporting writing for assessment in online learning

This article explores some specific issues involved in online learning and assessment. It draws on data from a postgraduate course for professional educators, delivered globally online, and highlights the relationship between students’ online discussion and their written assessed work, arguing that we need to focus on both of these in terms of the writing demands they make on students. In so doing it utilizes a theoretical framework which conceptualizes writing as contextualized social practice. The paper illustrates the complexity of the rhetorical demands being made on students in these new environments of teaching and learning and, in focusing on writing, complements present approaches to online learning which have, to date, tended towards collaborative and constructivist perspectives. The article highlights the relationship between pedagogy, technology and assessment. It concludes with a discussion of the design of an online writing resource to support student writers on this particular masters programme.     

Understanding Assessment in the Classroom: phases of the assessment process — the assessment episode

Many studies have shown that assessment in the classroom is a very complex procedure. As the first part of this paper explains, it is developed in four consecutive phases. That is, evidence collection, interpretation of this evidence, the teacher's responses and, finally, the impact of teacher's responses on children. Together these phases form the assessment episode framework. The second part of the paper illustrates the use of this framework in practice by exploring how Greek primary school teachers were carrying out assessments in the classroom, and considers the impact of these practices on children's learning. The paper draws upon evidence gathered by questionnaire and classroom observations of Greek primary school teachers. In order to clarify the complex issues of classroom assessment this article explores them in the light of the four developmental phases of the assessment episode. The quality of teacher comments, the assessment language used, the role of grading, and the relationship between policy and practice are also examined. The findings emphasise the importance of teachers being aware of the potential effects of assessment and the consequent need to use it properly for the benefit of teaching and learning.     

Feedback in Hong Kong secondary writing classrooms: Assessment for learning or assessment of learning?

While much of L2 teacher feedback research has focused on the effectiveness of feedback and its impact on student revision and writing, little has been done to examine teachers’ feedback in the larger classroom context of teaching and learning to ascertain the functions teacher feedback serves from an assessment-for-learning perspective. Using multiple sources of data from 26 secondary teachers’ written feedback to 174 student texts, interviews with six of the teachers and 18 students, the present study investigates the nature of teacher feedback and the functions it serves in the teaching-learning-assessment process in the writing classroom. The findings show that teacher feedback focuses largely on assessing writing summatively, primarily serving the purpose of assessment of learning, rather than assessment for learning – i.e., using feedback as a pedagogical tool for improving the teaching and learning of writing. The study calls for greater attention to the implementation of assessment for learning in the writing classroom, and specifically the use of feedback for formative purposes.     

The mediation of technology in ESL writing and its implications for writing assessment

The present study investigated the influence of word processing on the writing of students of English as a second language (ESL) and on writing assessment as well. Twenty-one adult Mandarin–Chinese speakers with advanced English proficiency living in Toronto participated in the study. Each participant wrote two comparable writing tasks under exam-type conditions—one on a Macintosh computer that traced and recorded their writing and revision processes and the other written with pen. Think-aloud protocols were also recorded. It was found that participants paid more attention to higher order thinking activities while evaluating their written texts in the computer session, that they revised significantly more at most levels on the computer, and that their computer-generated essays received higher scores in argumentation than the hand-written ones, suggesting that educators should seriously consider the impact of computers on writing assessment.