Chapter 8: Blogs on Assessing Competence (2 blogs)

Student Feedback

In Chapter 8 Kutz, Groden and Zamel explore and reflect on feedback and assessment procedures which might fit in with their “discovery-based” and SLA-inspired writing courses.  They state,

Issues of competence in this setting must focus on the nature of an academic discourse community, on how people function effectively in a community that is focused on learning and inquiry as opposed to straight transmission of information p. 140. 

They see assessment as part of the conversation they are having with students anyway, rather than separate from it.     

I found Nancy Sommers (1982) argument, referenced by Kutz et al significant: “most comments [i.e. feedback in student papers] are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text.”  With this in mind, along with the fact that according to SLA students are hindered rather than helped by too much attention to surface features, the Competence authors described their conversational approach to feedback.  The method involves readers and writers (i.e. teachers and students) writing to, rather than for each other, in a collaborative production, and the sharing of information which allows participants to “construct a shared frame of reference and a common understanding” (p. 143).  This feedback and these conversations model the discourse patterns of the academic community. 

The two major goals of this type of feedback, which functions, as mentioned above, like spoken communication, are as follows:

1.     build understanding, and bring students into the conversation of the academic community.

2.     Talk about how students are progressing as learners and how they can become more effective participants in the community.

“The correspondence [i.e. letters between teachers and students] modeled ways in which a framework of shared knowledge must be created in a written exchange as in a spoken conversation” (p. 146). 

The goal for teachers using this approach is “to respond as writer and as readers and to engage in creating shared understandings” (p. 148). 

Grading

Kutz et al. don’t seem to believe in grading only as something which interrupts the learning process for writers.  They focus on final portfolios rather than grading individual papers, and are sure to negotiate grading criteria with students.  On an institutional level, they feel that the criteria at their university which determines whether a student will pass the writing proficiency exam matches nicely with their own “what makes good writing” criteria (see p. 159). 

Overall,

the premise of Suzy’s course is that it provides a context in which the teacher can work with the student in the development of a collection of writings that will demonstrate the student’s proficiency as a critical reader and writer…It takes the assessment process back to its etymological roots in the Latin verb adsideo, which means to sit, stand or e at someone’s side as an attendant, aid or protector (p. 161).