Improving Writing and Thinking through Assessment is designed to help individual faculty and administrators select assessment approaches and measures to maximize their students’ writing and thinking. The book offers useful guidance, through presentation of recommended assessment guidelines and measurement principles in Part 1 and applications from a variety of contributors in Part 2. It addresses a wide range of audiences, including instructors who want to assess and thus foster writing and thinking in their courses, administrators and instructors planning to assess writing and thinking at the program or institutional level, and graduate students interested in improving students’ writing and critical thinking.
This book is more guide than a 'cookbook.' By providing comprehensive standards and criteria that help individuals or teams develop plans and measures to improve writing and thinking, the book should be helpful for academic and Student Affairs administrators and faculty - as the principles apply equally to all engaged in assessment.
Contributors, representing a wide range of educators, illustrate many of the approaches and methods described in the theoretical section of the book using a variety of assessment strategies at both classroom and program levels. Readers will see how different types of institutions, both private and public as well as undergraduate and graduate, have designed assessment strategies and plans to gauge and enhance writing and thinking growth in the classroom and across programs. They candidly describe challenges encountered and solutions they adopted or suggest. These chapters reflect approaches and perspectives from various discourse communities – including writing program administrators, composition faculty, assessment professionals, and individual faculty representing several disciplines.
The author argues the urgent need to develop strong writers and thinkers. She discusses challenges and obstacles, but underscores the necessity for more faculty involvement and institutional commitment. This book will help institutions and individual faculty design and implement sound, meaningful assessment strategies to foster effective writing and thinking that will both advance the goals of the institutional mission and meet faculty’s disciplinary objectives and scholarly concerns.
Table of Contents:
Editorial Review Board.
Preface.
Author and Contributors.
Part I. Writing and Assessment Foundation
Chapter 1. The Relationship between Writing and Critical Thinking: Considerations for Assessment and Development
Chapter 2. Foundations of the Assessment Process: From Accountability to Improvement
Chapter 3. Designing Robust Assessment Strategies: Following Assessment Principles
Chapter 4. Planning Assessment to Achieve Desired Outcomes (Learning Expectations)
Chapter 5. Measurement Strategies for Evaluating Writing
Chapter 6. Development and Evaluation of Thinking Skills and Part 1 Summary
Part II. Writing and Thinking Assessment: Campus Successes, Challenges, and Suggestions
Chapter 7. Faster, Better, Cheaper: The Iron Triangle of Higher Education Assessment
Chapter 8. Forging Working Assessment Communities: Focusing Attention on the Tricky Middle Step
Chapter 9. Building a Culture of Assessment: Using Multiple Approaches in Program Management and Mentoring
Chapter 10. Evolution of Assessment: How One University Acquired Vision after Building Blindly Assessing Writing
Chapter 11. Team Members as Stakeholders: Successful Collaboration in Writing Assessment
Chapter 12. Writing Assessment: From General Education through the Major
Chapter 13. Unfamiliar Territory: Charting the Way to Improved Instructional Practices to Promote Critical Thinking
Chapter 14. Evaluating Reflection through Writing
Chapter 15. Assessment Matters: Using Assessment to Improve Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum
Chapter 16. Students in the Engineering Discipline Need Active Involvement in Writing Assessment
Chapter 17. Multiple Benefits of Peer Review
Chapter 18. Teaching Writing and Assessment Skills: The Intrinsic and Conditional Pedagogy of Calibrated Peer Review™
Chapter 19. Linking Classroom and Institute Assessment of Engineering Students' Writing: The Case of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Chapter 20. Assessing Writing and Thinking (and more) in Institution-Wide Student Electronic Portfolios
Chapter 21. Epilogue
References
Index
