I am currently working with the Great Works of Literature faculty at Baruch on an assessment for the Great Works course. The faculty is interested in evaluating the learning goals for the course. The first step was to talk with the faculty about what they teach, how they teach it and what they feel about it. These are always great discussions and I believe fundamental to making a good assessment. At one point a faculty member stated that reading was a central part of the course and that she was, among other things, teaching in-depth reading. I was quite struck by this thought of reading and how the Great Works of Literature course taught students to engage with different texts and make inferences to the world around them through reading.
David Frost and I thought a lot about how to incorporate reading as part of the assessment process and how to design a prompt to fit with the specifics of reading for a Great Works of Literature course. The obvious was to ask students to read a short text and respond to it. But the difficulty was to find a reading experience that mirrored what goes on in the course. Reading literature from multicultural environments and then exploring the relationship between the different genres and cultures is an essential part of the course. But this is not easy to assess, and as most faculty say, even to grade.
For this assessment we are going to try an experiment; a pool of short texts will be available for the faculty to choose for the prompt. The students will be reading pre and post prompt texts that might be different in author or culture but the same in length and complexity and genre. The texts will also relate to authors or literary periods that the students studied during the semester.
The hope is students will be reading, and responding to the reading, in the same way they do in the course. The second hope is we will be able to draw out meaningful information about the students experience in the course as well as any increase in comprehension and knowledge. Everyone involved in this assessment is pretty excited about this experiment and its creative use of texts for the prompt.
I am too, as I hold in my breath to see if it really works.
Could the faculty members suggest what the goal of the assessment is? As in: By the end of the semester, the student will be able to…
“Read in greater depth,” of course, would be a cop out, even though it is the ultimate answer. How will we know they can read in greater depth?
Hi Dennis,
The reading part of the assessment is an overall look at the students reading experience, meaning we are piloting this mirrored reading experience in the prompt to gain information, and then perhaps we will be able to more precisley draw up either a new learning goal or more specifics for further investigation.
The main assessment is based on one of five learning goals for the GW course.
• write critical essays employing
o a strong thesis statement
o appropriate textual citations
o contextual and intertextual evidence for their ideas
In this assessment we are working with a traditional and codified look at the learning goals, while at the same time employing different formulas to look at student experience.
This assessment, our first that is course/discipline specific, is meant to be both formative and summative. That is, it should work both as a pedagogical exercise in and of itself, attuned to the learning goals of the course, and as a measure of how/whether the quality of student writing and the sophistication of their analysis changes over the course of their enrollment in a GW course. That said, the goal of this assessment is to 1) supplement the curriculum with additional writing exercises of the sort already on the syllabus, and 2) to see whether we can measure improvement re: both surface concerns and students’ ability to critically engage a text and articulate their impressions and analysis.
The rubric we have developed focuses on surface level issues as well as less tangible areas such as logical organization, sensitivity to intertextual connections, originality of response, textual support, etc. We’re hoping to look at more than the depth of their reading but also at how effectively they can present their reading of the assigned text in a short essay. This is all in keeping with the preferences of the faculty members involved in the project. It is very important to us that the final form this assessment takes emerges as a collaboration between Institute staff and GW faculty rather than simply imposed by us on their curriculum.