How to Prepare for Your End of Semester Meeting

In College Reading and Writing, you are assessed on your fluency in seven learning outcomes.  As you know, you are intimately involved in the assessment process.  It is your responsibility to demonstrate your understanding of each learning outcome and to collect and frame artifacts as evidence of your progress towards mastery of the learning outcomes.  In our face-to-face meetings, we will review the evidence of your learning and arrive at a placement for each learning outcome on the rubric.

In practice, this means you will need to

1. Summarize accurately each learning outcome and its “markers of fluency” (see this rubric for details on the content and markers of fluency of each learning outcome).
2. Look back on your work this semester and consider which artifacts best demonstrate your learning for each of the course learning outcome being assessed this cycle.
3. Decide the best way to present these artifacts on your ePortfolio in a way that demonstrates your fluency on the learning outcomes: photo, video, excerpt.  Hyperlinks to whole artifacts, do not, in most cases, provide a reader with enough guidance to see them as evidence of your learning.
4. Create a page titled Evidence of Learning – F2017. Use headings styles to structure the page by each of the learning outcomes. Each individual learning outcome section should include:
   • Your summary of each learning outcome and its markers of fluency
   • An introduction to the artifacts on the page
     • For example, “This photo comes from a piece of free writing that I used to make text-to-text connections when assigned to look through Brandt, Delpit, and Gee for passages to use in the Literacy Archive paper.  After choosing two passages, I set my timer for 5 minutes.  I started by paraphrasing each passage and then tried to see how I thought they might relate.”
   • The artifacts embedded in the page itself – not just hyperlinked.
   • Analytical writing assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the artifacts in terms of the markers of fluency and the technical concepts of ENG 122 and ENG 123 (by “technical concepts” I mean, for examples, “signal phrase,” “voice markers,” “annotation,” “TRIAC,” “Barclay’s Formula,” “text-to-self connection” among others)
     • For example, you might write about evidence of your learning on the Reading outcome this way:  “In this piece of informal writing, you can see me challenging Gee’s idea that Discourses cannot be taught by making a connection to Delpit’s assertion that teachers must teach students the ‘subtle aspects’ of the Discourses.  I’m particularly proud of the way I used voice markers in Barclay’s formula to make that connection explicit, but I feel as if my analysis of this connection could have been extended.  As you can see my analysis and conclusion section of this Barclay’s paragraph is pretty skimpy.”
   • Writing that explains your placement of yourself on the Novice-Master scale for that learning outcome, and a suggestion about what remains to learn to be a first-year master of the learning outcome.
     • For example, “Informal writing contributes to the development of ideas for later, more formal writing.  So while a first year master would have taken it further, this connection taken together with my margin annotations, shows me reading actively.  In order to achieve mastery, I need to go beyond finding and showing the connection and use it to build ideas of my own.”

It’s best to be scrupulously honest in your self-assessment.  These framing statements are themselves evidence of learning about the learning outcomes, even if you’re not yet entirely fluently executing all of the markers for that learning outcome in practice.

This cycle, we’re assessing these learning objectives:

1. Writing as a recursive process
2. Integrating ideas with those of others
3. Active, critical, responsive reading process
4. Engagement
5. Peer Review/Critique Own Work and Others’
6. MLA Citation
7. Recognition of and Control Over Sentence-Level Errors