Barbara E. Walvoord - Assessing and Improving Student Writing in College: A Guide for Institutions, General Education, Departments, and Classrooms

Barbara E. Walvoord

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ISBN 978-1-118-55736-5 (paper)

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ISBN 978-1-118-55918-5 (ebk)

The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series

To Sharon

WRITING IS A powerful way to have a voice in ones society. It enables professional advancement. It nurtures thinking and reflection. I have never met an educator who didnt want his or her students to write well. This focus on the importance of writing has fed the writing-across-the-curriculum movement, which is now stronger than ever (Thaiss and Porter, 2010). Writing is one of the most common skills that institutions choose for their quality enhancement projects as they seek reaccreditation. I wrote this book to provide institutions, departments, and classroom instructors with a single, brief, clear, and simple guide that will help them when they want to work more intensively on their students writing.

This book is arranged like my Assessment Clear and Simple: It begins with a chapter for everyone to read. That chapter establishes some basic concepts: what we mean by writing, what we mean by good writing, how students learn to write, and the basics of assessing writing. The next chapters are each addressed to a different group of peopleChapter Two for institutional and general-education leaders, Chapter Three for departments, and Chapter Four for classroom instructors.

The chapter for classroom instructors has a special role. There are two excellent books about working with writing in the classroom: John Beans Engaging Ideas (2011), for any discipline or course that asks for thesis-based writing, and Patrick Bahls Student Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines (2012). In my short chapter, I cannot repeat or summarize all their wonderful ideas. What was missing, I thought, was a guide to faculty workshops, which, as I emphasize throughout the book, play a crucial role in any campus effort to improve student writing. So the chapter for instructors is arranged not only as a guide for an individual faculty reader who wants to enhance writing in his or her classroom, but also as a guide for a series of three-hour faculty workshops that can be led by anyone, regardless of their knowledge of the field or their skills as a presenter: they need only to facilitate the discussion and not talk too much. Each workshop focuses on a different action that faculty members can take in their classroomsactions such as improving an assignment or integrating informal writing for student learning. The topics can be combined into longer workshops or adapted for different settings and lengths. Appendix B suggests the workshop outline.

I hope that the chapters will help a wide array of players to work together for the enhancement of student writing and, more broadly, for the empowerment of the writers in our care.

I HAVE BEEN nurtured and supported within the writing community for many years, and I owe a great debt to all those who have worked in it. Three anonymous reviewers made extensive and supremely helpful comments; I thank them for their time and care. David Brightman at Jossey-Bass has been a wise and sensitive editor for my previous Jossey-Bass books, and it has been a great pleasure to work with him again. Cathy Mallon shepherded the manuscript smoothly through production at Jossey-Bass, and Kristi Hein was a careful and thorough copy editor.

BARBARA E. WALVOORD, Ph.D., is Concurrent Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She has consulted and led workshops on assessment, writing across the curriculum, and effective teaching at more than four hundred institutions of higher education. She has directed three writing-across-the-curriculum programs at public and private institutions and was founding director of the teaching and learning center at Notre Dame. She also coordinated Notre Dames assessment efforts and its reaccreditation self-study. She taught English composition and literature, as well as interdisciplinary humanities courses, for more than thirty years and was named Maryland English Teacher of the Year for Higher Education in 1987. Her publications include Assessment Clear and Simple (2nd ed.) (Jossey-Bass, 2010); Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College