In June, a group of volunteer instructors and librarians met to assess the research Student Learning Outcome.  What this means is that a group of us met to norm student papers and then worked in groups of two (one FYS faculty member and one librarian) to assess and to talk about student research.  We looked at essays, annotated bibliographies, powerpoint demonstrations, etc., and evaluated them using a common rubric.  If you look under “Assignments and Rubics” and then “Writing Assignments” on the toolbar, you should find copies of the essays and bibliographies that scored the highest.  All but the first three include copies of the assignment. Keep in mind that we were evaluating the research SLOs and please forgive the way WordPress deletes some of the Word formatting.  I will be posting the essays from 2011-2012’s assessment cycle when I’ve recovered from figuring out how to post all of these! I will also be attaching the rubrics from both years. Stay tuned.

Again, I hope they will be useful as you plan your classes.  One thing we did discover, during assessment, was the importance of the crafting of assignments when asking students to do research.