Assessing College Level Writing in ENC 1101

Assessing College Level Writing in ENC 1101

Purpose / Rationale

Based on the premise that discipline based assessment activities at Valencia should be consistent from one campus to the next, we have done away with the exit exam for ENC 1101.

In order to promote the continuous improvement of our program, we propose a college-wide assessment activity in which a pool of randomly selected paperswould be holistically scored once a year by full and part-time faculty. This process would allow for substantive conversations among faculty and within departments on strategies to improve the quality of the work our students are doing. Our hope is that this process will serve as a model for a similar assessment process for Gordon Rule courses and allow us to better track the progress of our students.

Assessment activities of this kind are designed to yield information about the effectiveness our program as a whole, not individuals. No links will be able to be made between assessment results and individual faculty members.

Process

• On a yearly basis, full and part-time faculty teaching college-level English classes will gather to score papers holistically from randomly selected ENC 1101 students during the prior year – the offices of Institutional Research and Institutional Assessment will oversee the process for randomly selecting students. The randomly selected students will reflect the various instructional methods (On-line, classroom, hybrid, etc), locations (East, West, Winter Park, Osceola), times offered (day, evening), and instructor status (full / part-time) that students in ENC 1101 experience (see attached).

• Within the first several weeks of each semester, students will be selected and the instructors notified. During the second half of the semester, the instructor will submit a clean (ungraded) copy of the student’s paper submitted as part of the normal grading process. The paper should be in response to an assignment intended to elicit college level work in each of the four areas identified on the Learning Evidence Team rubric for Written Communication. The paper – free of all identifying information other than the student’s VID number – will be submitted to the faculty member’s dean. The dean will verify that the student VID matches the one randomly selected and will remove the VID number and indicate the demographics that the paper was selected to represent (Full/part-time; Campus; Instructional method). The paper will then be submitted to the office of Institutional Assessment for storage until the annual holistic scoring activity.

• The annual holistic scoring activity will have 2 components – scoring the randomly selected papers usingthe four point scaled identified by the Learning Evidence Team rubric for Written Communication and a facilitated discussion of the group’s findings while scoring. A summary document – including the tabulated scoring results and a summary of the group discussion – will be compiled and distributed to the Deans and department coordinators for dissemination, further reflection and goal setting to make improvements. Goal setting may require conversation and coordination with faculty teaching in other areas.