Blair Lord believes several misconceptions regarding the Electronic Writing Portfolio have appeared since the new system was implemented Sept. 9.

Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, said a major misconception is whether or not another faculty member is evaluating the writing assignment that was evaluated by the faculty member who assigned it.

“That makes faculty properly nervous, and that’s why I want to be so clear,” Lord said. “Nobody, except the faculty member who gave the assignment, is evaluating that student’s work on that assignment.”

He said there is no re-evaluation of any of the works in the portfolio.

“(Faculty) are still asked to evaluate it as a submission to the writing portfolio,” Lord said. “They are asked to focus on the execution of the writing in that evaluation, and the only time that the paper is then read later is when we look at a sample of completed portfolios to see if the institution is achieving its goal at demonstrating that students can write effectively.”

Rebecca Throneburg, chair of the Committee for Assessment of Student Learning, said faculty members are the only people that ever rate individual papers from classes.

“Nobody is ever re-grading an instructor’s judgment,” she said.

The university then selects 10 percent of the portfolios to be assessed in its totality, Throneburg said.

Karla Sanders, director of the Center for Academic Support and Achievement, said individual papers are not assessed again after the faculty member gives the paper a complete score.

She said a group of faculty trained to assess portfolios read the 10 percent of the completed portfolios.

“These faculty look at completed portfolios and identify trends across the writing in the portfolios using a multi-trait reading guide that was developed by experts in the field and by the faculty themselves,” Sanders said.

Remediation versus assessment

The EWP now includes an addition where students who do not pass their first two submissions will be required to get additional writing support.

Sanders said this addition to the EWP has created the misconception that the portfolio is remedial in nature, as opposed to assessment in nature.

“Throughout the many meetings on the EWP revision process as well as through the survey, we heard faculty ask that the EWP provide additional help for students whose writing was revealed not to be at the college level Eastern wanted to achieve,” Sanders said.

In the faculty EWP survey conducted in fall 2006, 80 percent of faculty wanted some type of remediation. Only 12 percent said it should not be a part of the process. In the open-ended response about what works least well in the current EWP, 10 percent wrote they were frustrated that the EWP did not identify, stop or remediate poor writers. The term “remediation” was used to describe this procedure during dialogue of the planning of the EWP.

Lord said a more correct term for this procedure was “additional support.”

Remediation usually refers to the situation when the student arrives on campus without the abilities expected to do college work, he said.

He said, generally speaking, universities don’t provide remediation.

Sanders said remediation implies students are not at the college level, which is not the case with the new procedure in the EWP.

“But, some students do struggle with writing skills, and faculty wanted to assure that help was available in a structured way for those students,” she said. “In assessment, we call this the feedback loop – information from data must be used to improve learning and that is what the writing improvement program portion of the EWP is designed to do.”

Lord said people who teach writing typically say not to mix overall global assessment of how well the degree program is doing with individual student evaluation toward the degree.

He said the challenge with keeping the two separate is that the EWP is something collected for institutional assessment, which students don’t have much buy-in for it.

By adding the procedure where poor individual ratings have a consequence of need of remediation, gives students incentive to submit their best writing, Lord said.

“We might get better information out of the institutional assessment,” he said.

Lord said the assessment and individual evaluation are linked together in this case because of the problems in the previous EWP.

In the survey, faculty felt students were not vested in submitting quality assignments. This portion of the new EWP is still being worked on.

Members of CASL and faculty in the English department are currently working on a plan to provide additional learning opportunities for students identified as needing them, Sanders said.

Faculty-developed process

Sanders said a misconception she has heard from a few people is the idea that the process for making the EWP changes was not a faculty-developed process.

“Many faculty groups as well as individual faculty members provided information to CASL over the two years that the EWP revision took place,” she said. “Initial feedback came from CAA and Faculty Senate, and then individual faculty were encouraged to respond to an online survey.”

The fall 2006 faculty survey had 220 faculty members participate, about 29 percent of faculty. Nearly 80 percent of that indicated they had taught a writing intensive or writing comprehensive course. The spring 2007 student survey had a response of approximately 3 percent, with about 355 students participating.

A plan was then developed based on the information gathered from this feedback and surveys, she said.

Information was also taken from a student survey conducted, as well as models from other universities, Sanders said.

Portions of Washington State University‘s Junior Writing Portfolio were used as a model for Eastern’s revised EWP. Students at Washington State provide a timed writing sample and submit papers from courses to portfolios. The need for additional writing assistance is based on the timed sample and portfolio submissions.

“The plan that was developed included several options and again faculty groups were invited to comment,” Sanders said. “CASL members went to several councils and committees to solicit feedback; an open forum was held; and a Website was developed for comments.”

All the information gathered throughout these processes was analyzed and taken into account, Sanders said. The plan was revised before being passed by CAA.

Lord said the changes were done through shared participation.

“The changes that have been made were done in response to felt need,” he said.

Emily Zulz can be reached at 581-7942 or at eazulz@eiu.edu.