Page 136 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

VALIDITY AMD RELIABILITY 103

plans and deeply evaluating students' writing in electronic contexts.
Recently, Margaret Syverson and John Slatin created the Online
Learning Record (OLR), the first public inroad toward deep assess-
ment that moves beyond the electronic portfolio (see www.crwl.
utexas.edu/~syverson/olr/contents.html for an overview of the
system). Although the OLR has been designed primarily for the K-l2
writing teacher, it can be adapted for the college or university writ-
ing instructor. The OLR contains many principles expressed in this
chapter; it fosters student participation in the evaluation process,
draws evaluation artifacts from several different sources, accounts
for the range of multiple literacies needed to write in networked
spaces, and traces students' progress graphically instead of numeri-
cally or alphabetically. Moreover, the OLR allows instructors to con-
struct narratives or visual tracks regarding student work that reflect
teacher accountability and respect for the students' efforts in the
classroom. Syverson and Slatin's OLR model (1999) points to the
positive effects that technological convergence brings to writing as-
sessment by illustrating how humane and democratic evaluation
can be in a composition course.
The OLR's greatest benefit is that instructors now can follow stu-
dent progress rather than focus on the product. Through various
forms of graphical plotting, writing specialists can track students'
perceptions of growth and change without the stigma of grades.
This is a critical step in realizing an authentic assessment program
for computer-enhanced writing classes, because many students still
come to these courses with the fear of technology. By reducing much
of the grading to a series of sliding bar scales and scattergrams, the
instructor can observe how various students rise and fall in relation
to certain challenges in writing for electronic environments. Final
grades still exist, as do individual assignment grades, but the nu-
meric or alphabetic distinction given to students now carries an ob-
servable history, a context for understanding why students receive
the grades they do in a course.
What is also impressive about the OLRs that, although retaining
some of the usual quantitative representations for data like sliding
bar scales and scatterplots, the information gathered is highly
qualitative. Because data are gathered from numerous sources, in-
cluding archived files, current projects, and student observations
and reflections of their growth as writers, an audit trail can be eas-
ily built with graphical dimensions to discuss writing development
in a systematic manner. Thus, a teacher can reach the most quanti-