Evaluating Writing
Evaluating Writing Using Analytic Scales, Primary Trait Scoring, and Dichotomous Scales
While setting up satellite sites in various departments, I noticed that many faculty spend too much time writing responses to early drafts of their students' writing. These faculty work above and beyond what anyone would or should ask of them. Rather than picking up drafts, making numerous comments, and handing them back to students for revision, let the students and the Writing Consultants in your Satellite Sites do some of that work.
What seems to make a WI course writing intensive at ECU (and probably at most places) is not that writing is taught in those classes, but that writing is assigned. Thus, the chief method for teaching writing in such courses is through evaluation. This approach makes great demands on the teacher. One way to take some burden off you is to place some of it on students. Peer response groups might be devised that enable you to discuss the assignment with your students (ask them "What do you think I'll take into consideration when I grade your writing?"), develop a set of criteria or features of writing that will be used in evaluating and grading the writing, and have your students get into groups of 3 or 4 to apply these criteria to each other's writings. This exercise uses class time; however, this work takes half a class and saves eight to ten hours of hard labor reading drafts.
Since the assigning of writing and not the teaching of it occurs in our WI courses, the continuing teaching of writing has to be done someplace, especially for those students who "just didn't get it" in Engl 1100 or 1200. The Writing Consultant assigned to your building ought to do the work of teaching. These people are trained to teach writing skills in tutorial or small group sessions; it is obviously best if they reinforce to those students who continue to have difficulty with writing those features you want stressed (for instance, the criteria devised with your students to be used in evaluating and grading an assignment-see below). Communicate with the Writing Consultant concerning what you want done.
Even as I suggest using the Writing Consultant in this way, I hesitate. The Consultant will be available only a specific number of hours each week to work with students. Still, within that limitation, the Consultant will be glad to help you however he or she can--is paid to do so and trained to do so. I recommend making a policy in your WI courses that indicates that students having difficulty with their writing will be required to visit with the Writing Consultant. Clearly, some students will excel in your classes; those students do not need further instruction in writing. But others will struggle. Let's see if we can help them. If the Writing Consultant is booked for the week, send your students to the Hub location, which has more hours and more Consultants, in Bate 2026.
