Writing Program Assessment

Our Method 

Beginning with teacher expertise and student writing, we partnered with Writing Program faculty to identify core curricular values and to design a reflection-centered assignment for program assessment. Over the next several years, we invited teachers to interpret student learning via those assignments in an assessment community of practice (CoP).  We crafted SF State Writing Program-specific threshold concepts that cut across our curricula, and built learning maps for each concept. Each learning map centers what students told us in their reflections about their experiences and learning as writers, including what West-Puckett, Caswell and Banks call “sideways paths” — the detours and seemingly unrelated stops that learners often take. 

Learning maps thus consist primarily of a synthesis of students’ own descriptions of their learning trajectories, married with teachers’ descriptions of typical students’ progress. In our learning maps, we focus on understandings (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) rather than judgments about the quality of students’ writing or their “mastery” of outcomes (Gallagher).  What have we discovered in our assessment so far? Among many findings related to first-year retention and writing development (see reports below), we are uncovering how students think about their own writing, as well as the affective dimensions of their experiences as writers in school.

Click on one of our seven threshold concepts to reveal the learning map for each concept, which describes students’ learning from emerging to meta-understanding. The learning maps document students’ possible progress across their entire undergraduate journeys, with students attaining meta-understandings in or even after their GWAR class. Maps are meant to be descriptive and non-linear, allowing for the sideways pathways evoked by the image at the top of this page.

Rubrics list criteria that are often framed in deficit language ("thorough; adequate; minimal; basic"). They locate failure in teachers and students rather than in institutions and systems. They lead readers to judge rather than interpret students' writing and learning. And they too often focus our attention on end goals, obscuring the learning that happens along the way. 

Unlike rubrics, our learning maps encourage teachers to use thick descriptions to analyze students’ writing. They help us avoid the white language supremacy that is often encoded in traditional assessment materials, and enable us instead to take a rhetorical and critical approach — for example, we have a threshold concept focused on language, culture and power, rather than the more traditional learning outcome focused on grammatical correctness.

To learn more about how rubrics (especially generalized rubrics) are often steeped in colonizing ideology that privileges White Mainstream English (WME) while further marginalizing the voices of students, we recommend the work of linguistic scholar April Baker-Bell, as well as scholarship on decolonizing assessment (see this MSU guide).