Thesis Paper Prompt
It is important to note what the underlying expectations of student ability were at the school where I student taught. The first major assignment of the year for the first novel, The Great Gastby was posted on Edmodo, the online student-teacher interface being used at the school at that time. The assignment, pictured below, had several central assumptions which, upon reading the papers, I concluded were not founded.
Needless to say, students did not fully succeed on this assignment. Llosa (2011) discusses the need for a better developed diagnostic assessment of student writing. To her, a diagnostic assessment would be one that identifies strengths and weaknesses in student writing but is fundamentally limited by its inability to identify the cause of these strengths and weaknesses (pg. 258). Knoch (2011) expands this discussion, focusing on the different types of rating scales that can be used to assess writing. The category that intrigued me the most, “Multiple Trait” involves “designing a new scale for each writing task” (pg. 83). This one is particularly useful for my project – though perhaps not for Knoch’s ambition to create a universal diagnostic scale – because of the way my project is structured.
The first and last assignments for my project are the same. In both, students are asked to write sophisticated, text-based thesis papers. Accordingly, I used my students’ initial thesis papers as an opportunity to diagnose class wide deficits and to formulate the same expectations that will be used to measure growth in their final thesis papers. Specifically, in the initial papers, I looked for students’ ability to:
- Use language to formulate a clearly stated argument
- Thoughtfully use and analyze relevant quotations to support their argument
As you will see from the following artifacts, students struggled in both of these areas.