Communication (through writing): Tools for Assessing and Teaching

The assessment of writing has the most developed materials of all the Essential Learning Outcomes. Here you will find all the resources you need for assessing and teaching writing, some duplicated in the Teaching Resources section of the Faculty Resources site. Any of these handouts can be downloaded by clicking on the little download icon in the top right corner of the frame you get to by clicking on the links below.

1. MIU’s Comprehensive Rubric (Holistic): This rubric is has three lines in it, including one for Holistic Thinking, one for Critical Thinking, and one for Writing. These “holistic” rubrics do not break writing down into all its criteria (as does the full analytic rubric below), but they are ideal for inclusion in syllabi where you want to assess Holistic Thinking, Critical Thinking, or Writing in an assignment. In other words, these are the simplified version of these rubrics for classroom use — borrow them please! They will help you and your students focus on one or more of these outcomes, without much work needed on your part. For more detailed understanding of each Essential Learning Outcome, go to the analytic rubrics for each.
2. MIU’s Holistic Writing Rubric. This rubric describes four levels of writing and can be added to any other rubric for a project that includes writing as a component.
3. MIU’s Writing Rubric (analytic): This is the rubric developed from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) by MIU faculty to suit our purposes. It is not normally all you need to score and grade assignments because it has nothing specific to your course in it, but it can be used to assess the writing dimension of any assignment, and it is a guide to what you should be evaluating in assignment that includes a writing component.
4. Considerations for Writing Writing Assignments: This guide was developed by Dr. Ben McClendon and presented first at the August 2018 all-faculty development seminar. It helps faculty create the best writing prompt possible, to think of all the kinds of issues that student writers must deal with in writing for them.
5. DCK Handout: This is the handout created by Angus Woodward to introduce Beaufort’s Discourse-Community Knowledge framework for creating assignments in any discipline. It was presented first in the August 2017 Faculty Development Seminar. Like the previous handout (“Considerations…” above), it is useful for faculty wondering how to structure their assignment in order to get the best possible writing from their students.
6. Levels of Reflective, Expository, and Persuasive Writing at MIU: This document was created in 2017 to identify levels of writing competence in three kinds of writing—reflective, expository, and persuasive. It can be helpful if you are unsure of how the rubric above (“1. The Writing Rubric:…”) translates into different kinds of writing.
7. Sample scored papers: These three papers were read and scored by writing experts on campus. They give you a clear sense of the standards we are applying to undergraduate work. Two are from an upperdivision business writing course. One is from an Maharishi Vedic Science Final Project
   1. Paper one
   2. Paper two
   3. Paper three
8. Annotated papers: The same three papers are also annotated to show where they are strong and need improvement—why they received the scores they did.