Assessment begins with curiosity

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Don't you wonder why students don't understand something you're trying to teach them? What is it that they don't get?

For example, I have been really struck over the past few semesters why students write such poor titles for their essays. They are either the title of the assignment ("Argument") or the topic ("Bartering") or some cute collection of words ("The Way I like it") that really doesn't identify the narrowed topic or their take on it. I was really curious.

Writing a good title isn't a specific competency for English 101, but I consider it part of Competency 2: "Organize writing to support a central idea through unity, coherence, and logical development appropriate to a specific writing context." Essay coherence and logical organization begin at the title. (All the course competencies are available online.)

So I developed several short instructional activities about titles, explaining what they do and how they might be connected to the thesis of an essay. In addition, I provided a list of all the titles of the essays written for one assignment, and we discussed how they differed and which ones seemed clearer than others. (When all the titles are the same, how do you find yours in the list of titles?) Finally, I added a question about titles to the peer editing questions, and I mentioned it in the "Essay Organization" section of my grading rubric. Now students spend a little more time crafting their titles, and their essays have more varied and more thoughtful ones.

How do I know? I scan the list of titles. I sort them into categories: very general, overly cute, unclear, on target. I can count them if necessary, but usually scanning them is sufficient. The titles aren't all perfect, but they're better, and if more of them are confused and the meaning is a bit garbled, I can see that students are thinking when they write them.

That's assessment. It doesn't have to be some huge project. It should begin with a problem tied to a specific course competency, identify one or more instructional activities, and end with some measurable results. It may not always result in success; sometimes we might just get better questions.

If each one of us did something like this, and if we shared what we did in a short document each semester, imagine how we could improve student learning! Aha . . . read on, McDuff!

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	Last updated by Karen Schwalm on November 09, 2006 .  Legal Notice. http://web.gccaz.edu/English/Assessment/Fall06/beginning.htm