/DAP0809CommunicationsHumanitiesandForeignLanguage

Assessing Writing in Gordon Rule Humanities Classes

Operational Communications & Humanities OSC Unit: Unit Purpose Statement: "To help students understand their place in a broader cultural milieu" Initiative Kevin Mulholland Contact:

Strategic Initiative: Goal Outcome: Objective: Objective Description:

Learning Assured Integrate individual student effort with the learning process.

College-level Writing Increase the percentage of students writing at the college level.

Initiative's Relation to the Strategic Plan: This initiative will introduce and develop an assessment process for “Communicate” in all the Gordon Rule courses that can be used to both strengthen the writing outcome for humanities general education courses and to create a college wide rubric for writing assignments and assessments. As such, it will help us find out if learning is truly assured in our Gordon Rule humanities classes.

Expected Results and the Means of Assessment

Expected Humanities faculty will reach a consensus on what "college-level" writing is Results 1: Means of A select group of humanities faculty will work with their colleagues in English to develop a set of "rangefinder" papers that Assessment: exemplify papers at the each level defined by the LET rubric (beginning, developing, competent and accomplished). A larger group of faculty will compare their grades on this set of papers to the "rangefinder" grades.

Individual Kevin Mulholland Responsible: Expected 8/1/2009 Completion: Stakeholders: Academic Affairs - WPK (10671) - Michele McArdle Communications & Humanities OSC (10682) - Kevin Mulholland Fine Arts WEC (10691) - Daniel Dutkofski Humanities & Foreign Languages EAC (10674) - David Sutton Results: On April 10, 2009 full time humanities faculty and deans met to read selected essays and discuss the scoring using the LET rubric. They also graded them using the traditional A-F grades. This process revealed a good degree of consistency among the humanities faculty. There were 2 papers that created a great deal of discussion, but it became apparent that a wide range of grades assigned to those 2 papers was probably most likely to be attributed to problems with the instructor's rubric. Most faculty were in accord when asked to describe Accomplished, Competent, Developing or Beginning papers. They were also close when they attributed letter grades to the same papers.

Expected Results 2:

We will ascertain whether papers that earn at least a "C" in Gordon Rule humanities classes are truly at college level, as defined in the LET rubric as “competent” or “accomplished”.

Means of By applying the LET Rubric for Assessment of Written Communication to a sample of papers that earned Assessment: at least a "C" in Gordon Rule humanities classes, faculty will be determine the number of students who are in the following four categories: 1) beginning; 2) developing; 3) competent; 4) accomplished in competence with written communication. The definition of competence for this assessment is the meaning and development; organization; language; and use of conventions in written communication.

Individual Kevin Mulholland Responsible: Expected 8/1/2009 Completion:

Stakeholders: Academic Affairs - WPK (10671) - Michele McArdle Communications & Humanities OSC (10682) - Kevin Mulholland Fine Arts WEC (10691) - Daniel Dutkofski Humanities & Foreign Languages EAC (10674) - David Sutton Results: There was consensus that "C" level papers are generally NOT "competent" or "accomplished". In almost every case, they were labeled as "developing" or even high "beginning". As the English faculty discovered in their February 20 meeting, most or many students will not reach the "competent" or "accomplished" level at the end of a single Gordon Rule class. There was a lively discussion as to whether they will have reached that competency at the end of all of their Gordon Rule classes.

Implementation Plan

Budget We will need to compensate faculty for in-district travel and we will need to pay for copying.

Requirements: Results to While humanities faculty have a good working consensus of how we grade and evaluate student writing, it is clear that the Improve: assumption that our graduates will be at least "competent" at the end of a single Gordon Rule humanities class is flawed. Also, a free-ranging discussion revealed a considerable problem in terms of curriculum continuity. Students exiting ENC 1101 have not learned the skills that many or most humanities faculty expect them to have. For example, they do not have much or any experience with research design and the use of MLA (or any other style of) citation. Our discussion also revealed a considerable range of what kind of assignments faculty expect of their students.

Changes for Faculty are anxious to explore the possibility of making ENC 1102 a co-requisite of any Gordon Rule humanities class to try Next Year: and make sure that students will have the skills they need to write papers in the humanities. They are also interested in meeting to discuss and define what the expectations of faculty should be via a vis their students. For example, should research papers be required or at least some evidence of research activity be required in major papers? They are also interested in creating a kind of clearing house of instructor-generated rubrics that all humanities faculty can access. Lastly, they are interested in the work of the English faculty as they work to refine the LET rubric.

Additional Document Attachments File: http://net3.valenciacc.edu/sip/uploads/Grading Results.docx