WCP Assessment

McKenna Rose

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Module 1. Drafting Reflective Essay

The following remote, ePortfolio drafting activities can be run in any order, all at once, or individually. Please adapt these modules to suit your student’s learning needs and your classroom conditions.

Part 1. Reflective Introduction Prompt

Take 5-10 minutes and review the requirements listed in the prompt below:

Part II. Group Analysis: Reflective Introduction

Take 5-8 minutes and read the Sample Portfolio Reflective Essay Afterward respond to following individually in a public facing document, a blog post, a private draft document OR in groups in a collaborate document, text chain, or recorded video chat:

1. What is the topic or unifying idea of the Introduction? What claims or sets of claims does the author make about that topic/unifying idea? What are some rhetorical gestures employed by the author?
2. Describe how the author has organized her paragraphs. Are some parts of the essay more successful than others, why or why not?
3. Describe the evidence and analysis in the essay. Does the evidence and analysis fully support and develop the claim, why or why not?
4. Describe the design/layout of the first page of this Portfolio. Does the author make efficient or innovative use of the affordances of the genre/tool. What’s your assessment of the page layout? For instance, what’s your assessment of the relationship between the written and visual text? What’s your assessment of paragraph structure?

Reflective Essay Freewrite

Take 15-20 mins to complete the following in a private word processing document, orally in an mp3 you can share with your class, in a recorded video chat, or in a screencast video (narration over the top of the artifacts)

Rhetorical Awareness/Stance: From the beginning of the semester to this moment, how have you “grown as a communicator”?

Your response to the question will form the topic and generate the claim of your reflection. To answer this question, think about the five major communicative modes in WOVEN–have you developed in any one of those areas more than others? Also, think about the artifacts you have produced this semester, what assignments or specific modes within assignments can you point to to show “development” over time? You may also want to frame your claim and subsequent essay in terms of one or more areas featured on the Common Feedback Chart.

Draft an outline of the 4-6 paragraphs you imagine will follow from the claim you just generated.

Organization: While the artifacts in the portfolio serve as evidence, remember, just like in the Literary Analysis Essay, you never want to lead with the evidence. Instead, you want to lead with claim and move from paragraph to paragraph in service of that claim.

What artifacts do you plan to analyze to develop & support the claim you generated? (i.e. what final assignments best show your growth as a communicator?)

Development of Ideas: How can you describe and analyze your own work the way we have described and analyzed images, poetry, essays, and film this semester? What key terms can you borrow from our analysis of design, rhetoric, fiction, and/or film to apply to your own artifacts?

 

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Home

Welcome to the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech site for electronic portfolio assessment. This website is your guidebook to the portfolio and contains all you need to know for your monthly ePortfolio assessment meetings.

The site also features feeds of help documentation designed for both faculty and students. Here you will find three types of features that you can use to better understand the portfolio and monthly portfolio assessment process:

Use these features as a guide to creating portfolios in Canvas, embedding different file types, and final portfolio submission.

If you have questions or suggestions regarding the contents of the site for about portfolio assessment in general, please do not hesitate to contact mckenna.rose@lmc.gatech.edu.

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About ePortfolios & WCP Assessment

Every student in every section of ENGL 1101/2 taught at Georgia Tech composes an electronic portfolio and submits the portfolio at the end of the semester. Each portfolio includes a Reflective Essay on the first page, a page showcasing the Common First Week Letter (1101) or Video (1102) and process materials through which students developed the first week common assignment, as well as a series of short, reflective paragraphs through which students narrate their progress through the course. In addition to the Reflective Essay, Common First Week assignment page, and connective reflective writing, students are required to include at least three other pages that showcase final drafts of major artifacts produced in the course along with process materials, that is drafts, pitches, artist statements, scripts, drawings, and peer feedback reports. Because composing in multiple modes is a central aim of the WCP, student portfolios are likely to include final and process documents for podcasts, videos, posters, presentations, board games, artbooks, maps, and much more.

The goal of the ePortfolio project is two fold. The first goal of the project is to integrate the reflection on writing as a process into every stage of ENGL 1101/2 at Georgia Tech, and the ePortfolio is the best measure of how well students meet the WCP outcome on process and reflection. When students reflect on not only what they learned, but also how they learned it, studies show they are more likely to transfer those skills from first year courses to their major subject classes. In other words, the portfolio demonstrates to students and faculty, the ways in which writing is a process that occurs in always changing constraints. Through the composition of the showcase portfolio, we aim for students to meet future writing challenges by drawing on a writing process best suited to the contexts they face.

The second goal of the ePortfolio project is programmatic Assessment.  Brittain Fellows and WCP Lecturers meet in assigned groups of three six times over the academic year to assess how well a randomly generated set of student portfolios shows how well the WCP has met its programmatic outcomes. The portfolios are scored in terms of the WCP Common Feedback Chart, which is embedded below.

 WCP Common Feedback Chart