I appreciate and respect Inoue’s community-based assessment pedagogy. Like he said in the essay, this pedagogy is a feminist practice, because it decentralizes the focus of power from the teacher and gives it to the students. That’s something I’ve always wished I could do. However, while I can see where he’s coming from and admire what he’s doing, it would be a stretch for me to ever apply this in my own First Year Composition (FYC) classroom. I say this not only because I like having some power and I don’t have the skills to put this pedagogy into practice, but because the context in which this pedagogy worked for him is so different from the context of the FYC classroom. The Nancy Drew in me did a little research and found out that the class he has used community based assessment pedagogy in is a 3000 level required English course for students in the “Rhetoric and Professional Writing” track and students seeking a Professional writing certificate. I imagine that the students in his class are toward the end of their education, and since they’re focused on rhetoric and professional writing, they might become professors and writers themselves. Therefore, knowing how to assess themselves will be of the utmost importance, and soon. So, it’s not that I disagree with Inoue’s pedagogy—I think he’s doing something wonderfully innovative for the students in his class. Instead, it’s that I don’t see how this pedagogy could translate into FYC. Fortunately, that’s ok—Composition is much more than FYC.
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As for Elbow and Danielewicz's article on grading contracts, I felt inspired. My grading and assessment practices have been evolving over the years, and I’m finding myself inching closer to contract grading every semester. So, it was nice to read an in-depth analysis of how contract grading works for these professors. More specifically, I was intrigued by the overview of their contract in which they list all of the criteria students need to meet in order to earn a B (246). What I like about this is that it’s so complex. And, in most classes, if you do these things anyway, you’ll get a B—why not just make it public knowledge? It seems like a transition to contract grading could be very freeing for a teacher. I’m going to keep an open mind about this, and I look forward to hearing what Shelli has to say tomorrow.
In response to “Good Enough Evaluation,” I just have a few questions about the differences between the following items: holistic scoring, norm based assessment, criterion based evaluation, rubrics. How are all of these similar and different? How do they all relate? I know I use a rubric, and I think it' s a criterion based one, but I’m not entirely sure what kind of evaluation I’m doing, and I’m interested in learning that. Anyone have any helpful articles or links to help me understand all the different ways of assessing student papers?
Hi, sorry Jes, I'm sticking my blog post onto yours as a comment, until I figure out how to post!
ReplyDeleteThe Inoue approach (communal assessment) struck me as inappropriate for a first-year writing course, because how can a student create a valid rubric for assessing his or her writing at such an early stage of her writing career? This seems like it would deteriorate into a case of the blind leading the blind. In a first-year writing course, the instructor should be the principal authority in composing assessment criteria, because she is presumably the one with the most writing experience—especially academic writing. Once the students have had more practice writing for the college environment, they may be able to decide (and articulate) what makes a good paper, and apply these skills in assessing others’ papers. But this is part of what a student actually learns in a beginning writing course, I think. When I consider the various levels of writing skill I’ve encountered in beginning writing courses, it seems evident to me that asking them what good (college) writing is, before they’ve learned how to produce it, would not be a useful exercise.
However, I also think it is important for students to understand that all grading of writing is subjective, as Peter Elbow points out. Nobody received a rubric from heaven—all such things are the creation of fallible human beings, and, as such, are subject to individual preferences, prejudices, and opinions about the things that are most important in a piece of writing. The reality of this statement became uncomfortably evident to me the first time I was required to assess student writing as a graduate student.
I find the idea of contract grading attractive in some ways. For one thing, it would help me eliminate student anxiety about their grades, if students could receive a B just for showing up. It would also give me easily explainable reasons for granting a student a B or not, thus reducing students’ desire to contest their grades out of confusion over the grading process or the desire for pushing me into granting them a higher grade. However, I am also deeply resistant to the idea that a student should get a particular grade for just doing the work, whether or not this work is of particularly good quality. In a writing course, I think it is important that a student produce effective pieces of writing, or at least improve his writing over the course of the semester. “Product” is part of the point of a writing course. Good product, that is. (Or good enough!) And I think the instructor is better placed to evaluate this outcome in a beginning writing course than her students.
And this is an actual comment on your post, Jes. :) I agree that it would be extremely difficult to implement Inoue's assessment method in most classrooms. Haven't we been trained, through years of schooling, to accept the instructor-as-boss model? And so too have our students of course. I have to admit that I feel comfortable having someone in the classroom who's acknowledged as "an" authority on the topic- meaning that at least my teacher knows more than I do, though she doesn't know it all. If this model were destabilized, I can imagine that many students would be uncomfortable with being asked to assess each other. Would they trust any grading criteria that was produced by their peers and not their teacher, for instance?
ReplyDeleteThose are great questions, Sarah. I imagine that freshman, specifically freshman in a required course outside of their majors, would not trust the grading criteria. It would likely be a disaster.
ReplyDeleteI do hope, though, that upperclassman in their own disciplines and graduate students would. To be honest, I wish I had taken a course like Inoue's my senior year of college--it might have helped me actually figure out some criteria for good writing in certain situations before I got to grad school!