Assigning and Evaluating Writing

Carolyn Matalene, Department of English

Writing in college, after the essays of freshman English, used to mean mostly term papers; fairly long treatments of a subject with footnotes and bibliography and essay exams. Our notion of writing has greatly expanded, however, during the last decade as we have learned more and more about the central role of writing in learning. College teachers are using writing in many different ways now to help their students learn and to require them to engage more fully with the material of the course as well as to assess their learning.

Thus, it is useful to talk about two different kinds of writing assignments: writing to learn and writing to show learning. Class notes, learning logs, journals, and response papers require students to write as they learn. Term papers, book reviews, critical papers, analytical papers, and essay exams ask students to assume the role of expert and to show what they have learned from their reading and from the course. Both kinds of writing are important and necessary in educating our students.

We know that our students who enter the work force in white collar jobs will spend 70% of their time dealing with written material. Being a professional these days; whether as a lawyer, an accountant, a manager, an engineer, or a civil servant, means being a writer. So it is surely our duty to ask students to write whenever we ask them to learn.

Assigning Writing to Learn

One of the best ways to involve students in the material of any course is to ask them to write regularly in response to the course. Asking your students to take double entry class notes can be a way to begin. Simply have them draw a straight line down the middle of each page of their class notebook. Lecture or discussion notes are written on one side and on the other the student makes comments, asks questions, draws conclusions.

More and more college teachers are now assigning journals as part of their course requirements. Students are asked to write regularly in their journals in response to the assigned readings. Here they may make any sort of comments they wish, ask questions, make connections, comment on difficulties with the material, offer personal responses. And here teachers can see just how well course material is being learned and understoodor misunderstood.

Journals also provide an excellent means of getting students to use, not just memorize, the important concepts and new terms of the course. You might ask your students to take one of the concepts of the course, say gender bias or voter apathy or the generation gap, and look for evidence of the concept in their everyday lives. Does their own experience or the information that comes to them via the news media confirm or deny its presence? In writing such entries, students become active learners, and in reading them, teachers learn who their students are, where they are coming from. Knowing your audience is the first step to reaching them.

Short response papers provide another way to use writing for learning. The assignment is to write a responseor an interpretation or analysisto a portion of the reading. Such papers are usually not more than a page long and need not be typed; but they do require that students read the assignment, and thus they are prepared for a discussion of it.

Brief, impromptu writing assignments can also be performed within the class period and these need not be graded or collected at all. In fact, one of the best ways to start class discussion and get students talking is, oddly enough, to have them write. "Write for five minutes about x or y or z." Students who focus their thoughts by writing a sentence or two almost always want to speak as well. (And extremely shy students, those who never speak up, can be asked to read what they've written; reading seems for them less threaten-ing than speaking.) Or, students can be asked to write at the end of the class period in response to such questions as "What did you learn today?" or "What was the most important concept covered?" A few of these responses read aloud can help you and the students summarize the day's material.

If you are an experienced teacher and subject to nerves in the classroom, if you sometimes lose track of your notes or simply run out of steam, consider asking your students to write for a few minutes. While they do, you can collect yourself.

Responding to Informal Writing

The informal writing you assign doesn't all have to be read. You can respond to some of it some of the time. Journals might be checked every week, every two weeks, or on a rotating schedule; you could read one quarter of the class journals at a time. When you respond to such writing, remember that it is not intended to be formally organized or editorially finished. This kind of writing is meant to show thinking in progress. So respond to it by responding to the person thinking; comment on the quality, originality, or thoroughness of that thinking. Offer encouragement, praise the writer whenever possible, and offer specific suggestions for improvement.

Don't try to edit informal writing; i.e. don't spend your time correcting this writing. Such corrections are pointless--unless students are going to be asked or allowed to revise their journal entries. The truth is, if students are reading and writing regularlyday by day and week by weekmost of their errors will eventually go away. But if you have a student with really serious problemsas opposed to being out of practicerequire that student go to the Writing Center.

Whether or not you grade informal writing is up to you; some instructors use a check or plus systemwith pluses worth more than checks. Some give points for fulfilling the assignments, and students can choose how many points they want to work for. An efficient method for evaluating journals is to read and comment on them throughout the term, then to give a single grade at the end. Keep in mind that students will not take their writing to learn seriously unless credit for doing it is somehow built into the evaluation procedure for the course.

Assigning Writing to Show Learning

The more writing to learn that students do throughout the term, the better prepared they will be for formal writing. They will be ready to use the concepts and the terms of the course in sentences and paragraphs and in papers and exams because they have had practice. (Writing research shows that students who write as they learn are better able to see relationships and make connections.)

Mastering academic discourse, the formal writing of a discipline that enables scholars to share their research, is not easy. But if students are never asked to write to show their learning, they are unlikely to have much learning to show. So, critical papers, summaries and book reviews, term papers, and essay exams are essential requirements in a college education, essential ways of evaluating how well students have learned.

A primary rule in giving a formal writing assignment is: Put the assignment in writing. Thinking through exactly what you want students to do and specifying as many parts as you can may seem time-consuming, but in the long run will save you time and prevent confusion. Oral assignments inevitably yield disappointing if not disastrous results, and furthermore, students can legitimately say they didn't understand what they were supposed to do. The assignment sheet you hand out should include the assignment itself, the format, the research required, the evaluation criteria, and perhaps the audience the paper is intended for as well as the due date.

Think in terms of the five part model: preparation, purpose, format, evaluation, and audience. Preparation or research required means what do you want students to do in order to fulfill this assignment; read a particular work carefully, read a number of secondary sources, collect information, interview subjects, or the like. The purpose is the statement of the assignment itself.: "Analyze the causes of," "Discuss the reasons for," "Review the research on," "Compare the methods of." Explaining the key termswhat it means to analyze or discuss or summarizeis a good idea.

Next, specify how the assignment should be presented: a five-page typed paper, following APA style, for example. Specify the required method of documentation as well as any suggestions for format, such as a review of the research or a discussion section. If you are asking students to write to an audience different from yourself, specify that too. Finally, tell students what criteria will be used to evaluate their work: originality, thoroughness of treatment, breadth of research, clarity of thought, or whatever you are looking for.

Sometimes you may want to have all of the students in a class solve the same problem or analyze the same issue in a writing assignment. But letting students have some options or allowing them some areas of choice, which authority to work on or which problem to analyze, is a way to get them to "buy in" or invest themselves in their work.

The one thing you can do that will affect their final product the most is to get them to see the assignment as a process or a series of stages. First research, then analysis and questioning, followed by planning and drafting, and finally revision. If you can possibly check their work, offer suggestions or direction at any stage along the way, you will be much more pleased with the results. Students characteristically turn in their first drafts; teachers who subvert that one short approach by evaluating in stages or by requiring more than one draft are genuinely turning students into learners.

Essay Exams

Of course, essay exams are by definition first drafts. But this special kind of writing assignment, if well designed, is generally thought to be a most effective method for evaluating learningfor inspiring it too. As Peppermint Patty said, "I hate essay exams. You have to know something." A good essay question should be easy to read, clear in its instructions, and answerable in the time available. As you write questions, depend on the verbs that describe common processes of thought: analyze, compare, describe, discuss, enumerate, trace, define, explain, argue, and the like. As you help your students prepare for the exam, you might show them how to perform these processes on the material of the course. After you have written a question, stop and ask if you can answer it, if you know what you want for an answer, and if your students have had the preparation necessary to answer it.

An efficient way to test for breadth of knowledge is the short answer question, "Briefly but adequately explain any ten of the following. Where appropriate give an example." Or, "Identify author and work and then explain the significance of any five of the following quotations." Morale is improved by offering some choices; students can't be expected to know everything for an exam, but they should know something.

You can help them plan their time if you specify on the exam the percentage each section will count. If the essay question is worth 50%, half the exam time should be spent on it; as obvious as that sounds, many students haven't figured it out yet.

Evaluating Academic Discourse

When the final product is turned in according to the due date on the assignment sheet the time has come for a grade. Deciding on the grade won't be that difficult if you have established clear criteria for the assignment. If you receive papers with serious writing difficulties or with numerous, distracting errors, again, don't spend your time editing the paper. That's the student's job. You can require revision, require a visit to the Writing Center, lower the grade because of the problems, or fail it. Do remember, however, that students are not going to turn in perfect papers. Published scholars have their writing gone over by many editors, then read and reread and proofread and re-proofread, and errors still appear in print. So read your students' papers as pieces of human communication; read for their content. But if the writing or the errors interfere with that kind of reading, get tough.

Putting grades on papers is perhaps the least pleasant part of teaching as well as the part that new teachers feel most insecure about. It does get easier as you become more experienced both in your field and in grading. When you begin grading a batch of papers, don't put a grade on the first paper you read or even on the first five or ten. Read several papers before you grade any, and try to get your own standards clear in your mind; then try to apply them fairly. "Good on coverage but not well organized" or "fine perceptions but not enough research," you might conclude. Such judgements tactfully expressedshould be written on the paper along with the grade as both explanation and justification. Summary comments that mention both strengths and weaknesses are major teaching tools, crucial instructions for improvement. Putting only a letter grade on a paper is rude, cryptic, and un-teacherly.

The more public and explicit you can make your standards to your students, the more likely they will be able to meet them. Tell them exactly what you think an A paper should have, how it differs from a B paper and so on. Students will do about anything we ask them, if we are clear in our requests. Their major complaint with teachers and grading is not difficulty and rigor, but vagueness, lack of clarity, and confusion. They don't mind working hard; they do mind not knowing what is expected of them.

Grading essay exams is different from responding to formal papers. It takes less time because you can read faster and write less because test answers tend to more similar than paper-length treatments. But applying standards consistently as you read a whole batch of tests isn't easy; brain fatigue and grade blur lie in wait. Again, don't put grades on papers until you have read through several, try to grade anonymously, and keep recalling your criteria. When you come upon the essay answer that seems to you just right, just what you were looking for, read it aloud to the class. The more public and explicit you can make your standards, the more your students will be able to meet them.

Grading papers can be rewarding, especially when you see students who have fulfilled the assignment, who have gotten the point, who have learned. If you plan your assignments and exam questions carefully, then specify your requirements and expectations clearly, the last person to blame for failure should be yourself. And since that batch of papers you brought home is not going to go away, you might as well deal with it immediately. The sooner those papers are returned, the happier you and your students will be.