Module 2: Part 2

Part 2: Traditional or Alternative Assessment?  

How can assessment practices motivate deep and authentic student learning and engagement?

How can we be more ethical, equitable assessors?

And how do we assess while being mindful of our own labor, especially as part-time instructors?    

Assessment scholarship has been asking questions like this for decades. There is still no consensus on one “best” way to assess, and this is because “good” assessment structures are highly contextual. Local practices, material conditions for faculty and students, students’ prior assessment contexts, student and faculty diversity, and many other factors can influence the efficacy of assessment.  

In the First-Year Writing and Part-Time Instruction program, we support the use of both clearly articulated traditional and alternative assessment approaches (and authentic assessment, too, though that can be harder to pull off in a first-year writing class!). We do not prescribe one approach for all instructors to use. If you have—and clearly communicate—the way that students will be assessed to them from the beginning of the class, you are meeting the requirement.  

However, in accordance with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s position statement on writing assessment, the two things that we ask are that:  

(1) your syllabus clearly describes how students will be assessed 

(2) you consider how your assessments are “informed and motivated by the goals of the institution, the program, the curriculum, and the student communities that the program serves.”  

We acknowledge that there are real and sometimes also substantial labor considerations in adopting and refining a new or unfamiliar grading system. We also think of assessment approaches as a constantly evolving part of a lifelong teaching practice rather than something that you decide once and then stick to forever. Our most experienced professors tend to adopt pieces of multiple approaches and continually iterate on all of their practices, including their approach to assessment, and we see that as a sign of growth and good pedagogy. Also, we feel that questions about assessment tend to be best explored in community with the first-year writing directors, your fellow instructors in the context of the practicum, your students, and with wider communities of educators inside and outside of Queens College rather than uniformly dictated to you.  

With all of this in mind, research does tell us some important things about the way that assessment—and, namely, grades—can impact student learning.  

For instance, rather than enhancing motivation, grades can merely enhance anxiety and challenge avoidance (Chamberlin et al. 2023; Pulfrey et al. 2011), diminishing interest in deeper and more authentic learning (Kohn 2011) and shifting students’ focus from learning to the achievement of a good grade (Horne et al. 2022). Grades can also undermine instructor comments when given at the same time (Butler 1988; Butler and Nisan 1986). This is why teacher-scholars like Susan Blum, David Buck, Jane Danielewicz and Peter Elbow, Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis, Asao Inoue, Dan Melzer, Jesse Stommel (and many more!) have advocated for deemphasizing, reframing, sharing the responsibility for, or even completely eliminating the role of grades in writing (and other) classrooms in various ways. 

However, how we create ways to use assessment to motivate revision and engagement and to promote equity can be complicated. For every champion of a particular assessment approach, there are several critics. Your fall semester students might love something that doesn’t work as well in the spring. And it takes a lot of work to figure out and iterate toward a better assessment system!    

So, in this second module, we recommend reading about a few assessment approaches with these many caveats in mind. Please also keep in mind that we are here to support you as you determine a system that works best for your teaching approach.

Essential reading: 

Optional reading: (choose a pair of two pieces):  

Activity 

After you read, think about what grading system(s) you’d like to try for the fall, keeping in mind that you can always change your mind for the spring! It is absolutely fine to keep the one on your model syllabus, or to look through the other model syllabi to see if there’s one that better suits your approach.

Ask yourself:  

  1. How does the system that I’m planning to use help me to assess that a student has met the learning objectives in this class?  
  2. What problems could I potentially encounter with this system?  
  3. What questions might my students have about this system? Is this something they’ve probably seen before, or will this require more explanation?
  1. Think about the planning questions that Jennifer Gonzales asks in the last part of “How Accurate Are Your Grades?”  How would I answer these six questions about my grading system, whether it’s “traditional” or “alternative”?

Keep track of your questions for when you meet with the Assistant Director later in the summer, or for orientation. And feel free to ask follow-up questions on Slack if you have them!  

Click here to go to Module 3: Choose Your Own Attendance, Participation, and Absence Policies.