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Examples of Assessment by Institution |
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Bowdoin College: Similar to many liberal arts colleges, Bowdoin has been working on ways to assess the writing abilities of its students. One of the strengths of small liberal arts colleges that the College often touts is the quality of the teaching of writing and the multiple opportunities given students to learn to write in their chosen disciplines. Given this, it has been a high priority for Bowdoin to assess the opportunities to write that are available to students in College courses and to assess their strengths as writers. A group of faculty met in the summer of 2008 to evaluate a sample of student papers written for a variety of courses taken in the first two years at Bowdoin. Through the examination of these papers, Bowdoin’s goal was to develop a rubric – a set of expectations – for student writing at the end of the sophomore year that could be applied across disciplines. Bowdoin’s rubric addresses three clusters of skills in which students are expected to demonstrate: 1) Competence (a facility with basic elements of grammar and style sufficient to lend readability to an academic essay); 2) Rigor (the ability both to establish an argument and to develop it consistently and progressively throughout an essay), and 3) Reach (evidence of insight beyond an expected or obvious level, and the ability to make such an insight at least somewhat central to the essay). Bowdoin is at the initial stages of getting feedback on the rubric and will hopefully pilot it in a small number of departments. The ultimate goal would be for faculty in each department to use the rubric to evaluate the writing of students who declare majors in their department at the end of students' sophomore year. The purpose for doing the assessment at this point is that departments could modify their curriculum to address the writing needs of their majors prior to their senior year when many may want to do independent studies or honors projects.
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Bowdoin College |
