Less is Less:
Results Discussion for LTWR's Student Writing Assessment Project 

So what might the results suggest?

While our students’ numerical scores are not especially high, the ideas with which they are grabbling are quite often complex and worthy of even more attention.  It is as if the numerical comments taken together with the written comments suggest that our students are fully engaged students who are not settling for simple responses to complex ideas.  The fact that most of the assessors made comments which pushed for further development suggests that our writers’ texts may be marked, at this point, by what cognitive compositionist Linda Flowers calls writer-based prose.  The ideas in the student portfolios are still in process for the writers and because of that are not made fully clear to the reading audience.  Often writer-based prose is marred by disjunctures in function, structure, and style.  As a whole, these issues seem to identify the student texts we assessed.

Simply put, these assessment results are good news as they help to make clear not only our students’ writing abilities but they also make clear the need for our department to discuss further the ways that we will strengthen writing instruction in our courses.  The teaching writing task is all about helping students transform their texts into reader-based texts.  If students learn to engage the writing process fully and recognize revision as a significant part of their writing processes and if as faculty we make even more explicit our support of students’ need to engage the writing process through the design and implementation of our course assignments, we are certain that our students’ skills as writers will only improve.