NJWA Conference
Programmatic
Assessment of First Year Writing
Description of
Presentation for Conference Program:
The Writing Program at The College of New Jersey is conducting an on-going campus-wide assessment of first year writing and will share detailed preliminary findings as well as data collection and scoring methods.
Abstract:
The Writing Program at The College of New Jersey began a campus wide assessment of first year writing in fall of 2003. All first year students wrote to a prompt asking them to construct a response to “Who should be given this text to read? Why?” Their responses were scored holistically by TCNJ faculty on a 6 point rubric developed by Writing Program and English department faculty. All first years were also asked to respond to an inventory of attitudes towards and practices followed in writing (the IPIC). First year students who took WRI 102 in fall 2003 were retested on both the IPIC and another writing prompt in December 2003, and those first years who took WRI 102 in spring 2004 were retested in both January and May of 2004.
The Writing Program experimented with various data collection methods: paper and pencil, data saved into a specially-created shared directory, and data collected by SOCS (simple online courseware system, an in-house course support software package similar to the commercially available systems such as Blackboard). We preferred the courseware collection of data into SOCS as it created data that could be scored on computer terminals and easily stored, and as it allowed the IPIC inventory to be answered on computer by students and stored into an MS Excel database.
Presenter:
Diane Vanner Steinberg, The College of New Jersey, Interim Director of Writing Assessment and Placement, 609-771-2864, dsteinbe@tcnj.edu. The Assessment Team at TCNJ also includes Ray Barclay, statistician; Dr. Jean Graham, Interim Director of Writing and Associate Professor in English; Dr. Felicia Steele, Assistant Professor of English.
Presentation:
I. How we decided what sorts of data to collect, how we went about collecting and scoring it.
II. What we have learned to date from our research about writing instruction and practices at TCNJ.
III. How our findings have changed instruction
Our work is still very much in process; we expect to collect data from first year writers for three years, and from graduating seniors until those three entering classes have (mostly all) graduated.