Evaluating Student Work

Tip for new teachers: Base students’ grades on the effectiveness of their choices within their writing as it relates to their audience, purpose, and genre. Attaching a grading rubric along with a description as to why the individual earned their grade would be beneficial as well.

Why is this beneficial?

• Aligns with all three of the pedagogical approaches we’ve discussed in this website.

  • It helps students to think purposefully about digital genres they use and how to use them to reach different audiences and have different purposes, which is part of New Media Pedagogy.

  • It emphasizes student choice and individuality, which is part of Expressive Pedagogy.

  • It promotes reflection and revision, which is part of Process Pedagogy. Students are asked to reflect on the choices they make and to revise their work in the aim to make their texts more effective.

What can this look like in the ENC 1101 classroom?

• Grade throughout the course focusing on process and student choice, not just the final product.

• Have students evaluate each other’s work and compare their evaluations to yours.

• When evaluating a multimodal project, include a part of the evaluation that assesses students’ awareness of their rhetorical choices. When students decide which modes to use in a text, they must also be thinking about how different modes will be more/less effective for a given audience, purpose, and genre.

• The nature of teaching students to adapt to their audience and purpose, simultaneously directs students attention away from the rule-based structure of Standard Academic English.