COETAIL--Assessment in the Creative Writing Classroom
I was intrigued by the article "Collaborative Learning in the Digital Age" by Cathy Davidson--the student innovations resulting from the iPod experiment; the notion of collaboration by difference; the course assignment for students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia; the potentially different types of writing that emerge on a blog versus in a term paper; the idea of crowdsourced grading; and the combination of traditional "contract" grading with peer grading.
Daphne Koller's TED Talk "What We're Learning from Online Education"
discusses Coursera, and midway though the talk she offers thoughts on personalized education and both peer -and self-evaluation for grading. She suggests that in the digital age we can use technology to do much of our grading, and explains that peer- and self-grading can be used for critical thinking work that can't be graded by multiple choice. She cites one study in which peer grading and self grading closely correlate with teacher grading.
I'm intrigued with both of these discussions because as a university creative writing teacher--fiction writing and poetry--I've been using peer and self-evaluation in my courses for years, sometimes as part of my final grading. In my creative writing classes I use peer feedback, peer evaluations, self-evaluations, writing in stages, and rubrics, and final portfolios to assess the students. But in the end I always have to assign a traditional grade, and generally the peer and self-evaluations have all been off-line due to some of the tech challenges I face as discussed in a previous post. I wonder though, if I might find that having students post stories online to their classmates might generate more committed and thoughtful drafting in the first place, as well as more committed reading of the stories, and more careful commenting. Would the online dynamic change the quality of the work turned in? Would the comments be deeper or more substantive?
Face-to-face feedback for writers is vital, I believe, so online posting of stories and commenting would not replace group critiquing in my classes, but rather complement face-to-face critiquing. Perhaps online reading and commenting would serve, in part, as preparation for the in-class discussions. For EFL students, in-class group critiques are an effective means of increasing student speaking confidence, developing peer bonds, improving listening skills, and furthering discussion skills, but perhaps these group critiques would be even more effective if students had already pre-commented online.
Writers both pre-published and published generally are careful about what poems and stories they post online; work that has previously appeared online--on a blog or in a public forum--is often not eligible for publication in juried print or online literary magazines. So when writers critique each other online, they do so usually in closed environments. In my classes, online posting of stories and poems would also be in a controlled classroom group. But perhaps to take the peer evaluation a step further, what if my students' final stories were all posted on a website for public comment at the end of the course? Would I find that the quality of stories was higher? Would the editing and polishing of stories lead to too much emphasis on product over process? Would I find myself placing too much emphasis on cleaning up second-language grammar errors? Would students be less courageous and experimental in their writing? Or more? Would this help eliminate the occasional problem of a borrowed plot or a translation submitted as an original?
The only way to find out is to experiment. As Davidson says "Learn. Unlearn. Relearn."
Daphne Koller's TED Talk "What We're Learning from Online Education"
discusses Coursera, and midway though the talk she offers thoughts on personalized education and both peer -and self-evaluation for grading. She suggests that in the digital age we can use technology to do much of our grading, and explains that peer- and self-grading can be used for critical thinking work that can't be graded by multiple choice. She cites one study in which peer grading and self grading closely correlate with teacher grading.
I'm intrigued with both of these discussions because as a university creative writing teacher--fiction writing and poetry--I've been using peer and self-evaluation in my courses for years, sometimes as part of my final grading. In my creative writing classes I use peer feedback, peer evaluations, self-evaluations, writing in stages, and rubrics, and final portfolios to assess the students. But in the end I always have to assign a traditional grade, and generally the peer and self-evaluations have all been off-line due to some of the tech challenges I face as discussed in a previous post. I wonder though, if I might find that having students post stories online to their classmates might generate more committed and thoughtful drafting in the first place, as well as more committed reading of the stories, and more careful commenting. Would the online dynamic change the quality of the work turned in? Would the comments be deeper or more substantive?
Face-to-face feedback for writers is vital, I believe, so online posting of stories and commenting would not replace group critiquing in my classes, but rather complement face-to-face critiquing. Perhaps online reading and commenting would serve, in part, as preparation for the in-class discussions. For EFL students, in-class group critiques are an effective means of increasing student speaking confidence, developing peer bonds, improving listening skills, and furthering discussion skills, but perhaps these group critiques would be even more effective if students had already pre-commented online.
Writers both pre-published and published generally are careful about what poems and stories they post online; work that has previously appeared online--on a blog or in a public forum--is often not eligible for publication in juried print or online literary magazines. So when writers critique each other online, they do so usually in closed environments. In my classes, online posting of stories and poems would also be in a controlled classroom group. But perhaps to take the peer evaluation a step further, what if my students' final stories were all posted on a website for public comment at the end of the course? Would I find that the quality of stories was higher? Would the editing and polishing of stories lead to too much emphasis on product over process? Would I find myself placing too much emphasis on cleaning up second-language grammar errors? Would students be less courageous and experimental in their writing? Or more? Would this help eliminate the occasional problem of a borrowed plot or a translation submitted as an original?
The only way to find out is to experiment. As Davidson says "Learn. Unlearn. Relearn."
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