Education Commons^™

Making The Most Of Existing Resources: An Online Rubric Database In University-Wide Writing Program Assessment, Jennifer M. Good, Kevin Osborne

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

When creating an assessment plan to measure writing outcomes for a university-wide writing across the curriculum (WAC) program, administrators considered multi-layered evaluation methods for benchmarking and measuring internal growth of students. Although assessment plans must address these needs, the actual assessment practices must be flexible, accessible to faculty, and feasible--based on existing technological structures and data systems at an institution. The writing assessment that is provided addresses all of these elements and is offered as a model for other programs.

For this particular study, the internal aspect of the assessment plan that tracks growth of students over time is the …

Making Grades Matter: Connections Between Teacher Grading Practices And Attention To State Assessment, Gregory D. Warsen

Dissertations

Research suggests that traditional grading practices are fraught with subjective problems and that many factors go into grading that have little, if anything, to do with what a student knows or is able to do. More recent research, however, has made connections between teacher-assigned grades and subsequent performance on the American College Test using correlational studies. This study reinforces and extends that work by, first, testing the relationship between grade point averages (GPAs) and ACT scores for four graduating high school classes in two case study high schools. Then, this study qualitatively examines teacher thinking and decision making around planning …