What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

USU Press. What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in. Teaching and Assessing Writing. Bob Broad. Follow this and additional works at.
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If resumption of the project is problematic, sensemaking is biased either toward identifying substitute action or toward further deliberation Weick et al. The need for frameworks to make sense of disruption cannot be emphasized enough.

Works Cited

As Weick noted, we perpetually use frameworks to make sense of the ongoing stream of experience we encounter: When predictions or frameworks are no longer entirely reliable, their direction of interpretations is loosened. The testing of new frameworks and new interpretations is accomplished through the sensemaking practices of noticing and bracketing, labeling, and retrospection. In other words, while sensemaking might begin with individual actors envisioning events in different ways, subsequent labeling allows for increasingly widespread and cooperative if not consensual communication, action and organization.

This understanding of the relationship between interpretation and action lends itself to discussing assessment work. Understanding writing assessment and outcomes design as sensemaking underscores the vital roles of interpretation, action, and communication to assessment work. By means of assessment, disciplinary practitioners interpret the student work they receive; they act respond and evaluate ; they articulate inherited and emergent disciplinary values through the communication and institutionalization of assessment rubrics, regimes, and frameworks.

In the case of composition studies, writing assessments articulate differing but nonetheless collaborative values about what constitutes good writing. When describing assessment as sensemaking, however, we must be careful not to equate assessment solely with evaluation, since evaluation frequently reduces context. This does not simply mean that such a category can be interpreted differently by different people.

Using a Writing Rubric with Students

As Weick explained, sensemaking includes interpretation, but is not synonymous with it: What sensemaking does is address how the text is constructed as well as how it is read. Understanding assessment as sensemaking has particular relevance for multimodal assessment. Anne Wierszewski noted the rhetorical dexterity afforded by multimodal compositions privileges an interpretive, rather than narrowly evaluative, response: Instead, we should take care to do as Wysocki has implored us: A focus on the rights and wrongs of form cannot account for the kinds of choice, creativity, and experimentation demanded by multimodal pedagogical models.

However, as Jody Shipka warns us, such generous reading is rarely done at leisure for composition teachers , p.

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As discussed earlier, multimodal composition has greatly troubled the use of print-centered frameworks to understand writing; as a result, many composition instructors engaged in multimodal assessment report struggling with the absence of immediately suitable models and frameworks with which to make sense of the work being assessed. It also suggests the role of disciplinary and professional networks in acting upon and articulating these new frameworks.

Instructors interpreted texts using trusted, print-based frameworks.

Where these familiar categories fell short, however, the instructors adopted strategies of noticing, bracketing and labeling anything different or unique about the multimodal texts. However, as Weick et al.


  • The Tales of Tanglewood: The Curse of Satyr Stump;
  • Analyzing and Assessing Multimodal Compositions: A Bibliography?
  • 3 editions of this work;

Indeed, Wierszewski herself contributes to this coordination and distribution of new multimodal assessment categories. In discussing how articulation plays out in practice, Weick et al. Multimodal assessment, as sensemaking, is not a process confined to the minds of individual practitioners. However, the haunting questions remain: Are shared beliefs a necessary condition for organized action [and] is the construct of collective belief theoretically meaningful [?

When information is distributed among numerous parties, each with a different impression of what is happening, the cost of reconciling these disparate views is high, so discrepancies and ambiguities in outlook persist.

CF Review of Broad et al., ORGANIC WRITING ASSESSMENT by John Eliason

Thus, multiple theories develop about what is happening and what needs to be done, people learn to work interdependently despite couplings loosened by the pursuit of diverse theories, and inductions may be more clearly associated with effectiveness when they provide equivalent rather than shared meanings. The MAP Group rejected both generic rubrics and idiosyncratic assignment-specific criteria for their scalable approach. As the Group reported in the account of their work,. Finding the language of print-based rubrics too limiting, MAP articulated a multimodal assessment framework encompassing five broad domains: These domains, according to the MAP Group, were vital because they operated at both macro- and micro-scales:.


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Yet the MAP domains also begin at that intimate level of student-teacher and writer-reader interaction. Multimodal Assessment Project Group, For this assignment, ninth grade students in an American Studies classroom were asked to tweet the thoughts of characters from The Things They Carried as chapters from the text were being read aloud.

They only acquire meaning in relation to the entire series of posts, The Things They Carried , the collaborative groups from which these posts emerged , and the poems inspired by these tweets that the students wrote subsequently. In embracing the challenge to make sense of this ambiguity, MAP works to move past an assessment framework seen especially in large-scale assessment that emphasizes evaluating the composed artifact to the exclusion of other dimensions:. In other words, context becomes a space for the alignment and scaling up of sensemaking frameworks. At the same that individual designers and instructors articulate what multimodal activities and artifacts mean in their local contexts, disciplinary frameworks align these local articulations using flexible assessment categories.

In doing so, it seeks to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach of generic rubrics, but also the immotility of assignment-specific criteria. In articulating the priority of meaning over evaluation, sensemaking highlights the central challenge of multimodal assessment: His research interests include multimodal composing and assessment, writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, composition pedagogy, and critical theory.

Utah State University Press. Crossing the digital divide: Race, writing, and technology in the classroom Monroe, Barbara - New York: The new work of assessment: Evaluating multimodal compositions Murray, Elizabeth A. Writing assessment and the revolution in digital texts and technologies Michael Neal - New York: Negotiating rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological difference: Assessing student new media compositions Sorapure, Madeline - Kairos.

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Teaching and writing in the age of computers and high-stakes testing Whithaus, carl - Mahwah, NJ: Looking for sources of coherence in a fragmented world: Available through Interlibrary Loan Reinventing writing assessment: It certainly could, as the co-authors and especially Bob Broad present his Dynamic Criteria Mapping DCM process as preferable to the ways many people assess writing within their own colleges and universities.

In What We Really Value , DCM is expressed as an assessment process informed by the work of those who value site-based, context-sensitive, qualitative inquiry. Since the publication of that book seven years ago, however, the arenas of writing assessment have become more charged than ever, often through loud cries for accountability, efficiency, and financial responsibility.

The challenge of assessing writing can seem daunting to even the best-intentioned of faculty and administrators. Fortunately, after reading Organic Writing Assessment , they may come away hopeful: Through their attention to assessment work in several universities and a community college, the authors demonstrate the generative potential of DCM. Broad and his co-contributors lead their readers through agricultural and ecological figures of thought to emphasize that just as people who aspire to healthy living must know and understand the complexity of food production, so must those involved with writing assessment know and acknowledge the richness of their institutional contexts.

Readers of the book will witness explicit and implicit arguments for the value and legitimacy that results when educators themselves are the ones to articulate the many variables of their assessment projects. To varying degrees, the Organic writers also highlight pertinent assessment history and resources that could be helpful to readers interested in developing home-grown assessments. Lincoln, and Pamela Moss. Indeed, Broad and his colleagues have shaped a substantive argument for nourishing home-grown opportunities for assessment.

Faculty teaching graduate seminars in writing studies would likely appreciate the addition of Organic Writing Assessment to the literature on writing assessment. So might others who study assessment theory and practice, and I believe the book will be of particular interest to writing program administrators and faculty, general education specialists, and writing across the curriculum consultants.

Patient administrators could also benefit from considering the multiple examples of complex but thoughtfully designed approaches to DCM. Though Organic Writing Assessment definitely functions as a stand-alone text, the work does not constitute an edited collection.