Developing a Tool For Assessing Writing in a General Psychology Course.

Abstract

This article describes and discusses the development of a writing assessment tool applied to student writing produced in an introductory psychology course. A performative scoring tool is discussed as appropriate for the study given the location of students in a developmental education curriculum, the purpose of measuring improvement in student writing products, and the current state of scholarship in writing assessment. The process of arriving at this tool is also discussed as beneficial for a faculty committed to teaching writing across the curriculum.

Introduction

Faculty in the University of Minnesota's General College have been working toward making the experiences that students have with writing more consistent and coherent across the curriculum. It's not that we all wish to give the same assignments or that we wish students would practice the same kind of writing in our classes, but rather that students come to see the different kinds of writing that they do in our classes as having cross-over value. If students cannot "invent the university," to repeat a much-used term coined by composition theorist David Bartholomae (1985), then teachers directing students into the particular forms and discourses that they enter into through composition, and through content-area courses, can nevertheless offer some common strategies and build recognizable cross-curricular writing expectations.

In this piece, we describe how we came to a particular assessment tool that would address our concerns for writing completed in an introductory psychology course. We developed such a tool in order to test whether the process that students used in order to write for this course produced effective writing. In carrying out such a project, we kept in mind that our tool would have to be sensitive to the context in which the writing was carried out. Often, assessment of student writing is performed on writing produced in artificial settings, removed from immediate teaching situations. Since we were interested in the connection of the writing product to the particular course situation in which that writing was produced, we consciously chose to work with graded, course-based writing.

Our awareness of the high value placed on products of writing in our university and the need for students to learn to approximate the kinds of texts that will lead to success in future courses further convinced us of the need for an examination of student papers. We wanted to know, in short, whether students were learning to write effective academic prose in a course that paid some attention to student writing. To this end, we set out to examine student writing performed over a single ten-week term in order to determine whether writing about a limited number of concepts in the course would help students improve their writing in a number of definite ways. We also recognized that assessing the products in this way would steer our analysis in a direction that would obscure other important aspects of student writing performance. It would not tell us, for example, about their attitudes toward writing, a significant factor for developing writers (Herrington and Curtis, 2000).

As we developed our assessment tool, the process we went through also led to a deeper discussion about writing and its perceptions held by teachers in our courses and separate fields. Below, we describe the process of arriving at our tool and discuss how its development helped us to communicate to each other our previously tacit assumptions and expectations about writing.