Presented By: Suzanne Lane, PhD, Director, Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication, MIT

When we assign writing, we have an obligation to evaluate the written work that students produce.  We usually think of this task as “grading,” and are primarily measuring whether individual students have produced strong or weak work on the assignment.  While this is necessary, this approach in itself cannot differentiate between what students have learned in our class, and what knowledge they brought with them.  Various forms of student self-assessment can help us parse these different knowledge bases, and thus gain a better sense of the effectiveness of our teaching.  We can also use this combined evaluation process to gain information about what students have collectively understood about writing, and where their writing knowledge overall is stronger or weaker.  Evaluating writing in this way helps us to also evaluate our teaching, as this approach to evaluation provides a feedback loop on what students as a whole have learned well, missed, or misunderstood about genre and rhetorical structure, as well as what they understand about the habits and processes involved in academic writing.  This workshop will provide a framework for evaluating written work as a reflection of conceptual knowledge about writing, as well as introduce other specific tools for evaluating students’ writing knowledge and our own teaching.  

Participation in this workshop is limited to registered participants only. All registered participants are required to attend the entire workshop.

Lunch will be provided at 12:30pm and refreshments will be available in the afternoon. If you have any specific dietary needs, please do let us know.

Please direct all questions and RSVP to teachers@lmu.edu. 

This workshop is a Core Course Development Workshop - for details on the new Core Curriculum and other events, see HERE.

Additional August Core Course Development Workshops offered by Suzanne Lane:

8/13/14 (am): Not Just Skills: Teaching Transferable Writing Knowledge
8/14/14 (am): Designing, Sequencing, and Scaffolding Writing Assignments
8/14/14 (pm): From Assignment to Revision: How Instruction and Feedback Shape Student Writing
8/14/14 (pm): Best Practices for the Collaboration between Course Instructor and Writing Instructor

Printouts of presentation slides are available upon request.

This program will be video and audio taped and may be podcast. By your willing participation in the program, you expressly and irrevocably consent to be photographed, videotaped and/or audio taped and quoted/cited. The films, tapes, and other digital recordings will become the property of the Center of Teaching Excellence, LMU.