Chapter 5: Assignments & Assessment in English 1101 & English 1102

What Is the Common Feedback Chart?

The Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech teaches WOVEN communication. To help you learn about and use WOVEN communication, not only in your writing and communication courses but also in your other courses and in your workplace and community activities, you have access to an important tool. This tool is a common feedback chart that characterizes communication in six important areas. The top row of the chart presents a continuum with six broad levels of competence, from basic (learning literacy competence) to exemplary (demonstrating consistent professional-level excellence). The left-hand column presents six rhetorical categories that are particularly important to achieving effective communication. You can self-assess your own work using this chart, checking your own competence in each category to determine how you compare with all communicators (not just those in college classes), from people who have limited literacy to those who are professional writers, speakers, and designers. Don’t be surprised if your self-assessment shows that your competence varies from category to category, depending on the kind of artifact, including its mode and medium.

The chart will also be used by your professors and peers to assess your work in English 1101 and English 1102. Your professors may often customize the chart for an assignment in order to focus on specific rows or columns. In those situations, your energy and emphasis should reflect the selected categories in the chart, so that you develop the particular competencies targeted in the assignment.

How Does the Common Feedback Chart Affect My Grades?

The Writing and Communication Program common feedback chart helps you identify your overall communication performance, giving you a holistic sense of how you compare to other communicators (from those with limited literacy to those with expertise). This macro view of your performance is based on examining your performance over a period of time.

Your professor will also use the chart for providing feedback on specific artifacts you create in response to class assignments. Feedback on an assignment-specific version of the chart gives you information you can use to improve your performance on the particular assignment (if a revision is permitted) and provides information you can use to improve your performance on the next assignment. The assignment-specific rubric gives you a micro view of your performance on a specific assignment.

Because they are neither complete novices nor expert practitioners, most student communicators fall in the middle ranges of the WOVEN common feedback chart. You might earn a B or an A on an artifact for class, indicating that you are advanced in your performance for that specific class assignment. However, an A on a first-year college assignment does not mean you are in the same “mature” or “exemplary” category as expert communicators. The chart provides you with overall feedback about what you are doing well and what you can do to improve. If you adequately meet expectations, then you will probably earn a C or perhaps a B. If you exceed expectations, you will probably earn an A or a B. Earning a D or an F reflects a failure to meet expectations. If you want more feedback about your performance or your grade, you should make an appointment with your instructor to discuss your progress in the course.

Writing and Communication Program Common Feedback Chart

What Is the Common First Week?

The Writing and Communication Program requires all sections of English 1101 and 1102 to share the Common First Week (CFW). This ensures consistency across the program and makes it easier for you to switch to another section during the add/drop period if you choose to do so.

During the first week of classes, your instructors will do the following:

  • Describe the course theme and the semester’s major projects
  • Ask you and your classmates to introduce yourselves
  • Provide an overview of the syllabus and course policies
  • Discuss critical concepts such as rhetoric, process, and multimodality
  • Assign the multimodal diagnostic project
  • Dedicate class time to preparing for the diagnostic project
  • Reflect on the diagnostic project after you have submitted it

Building Your Communication Portfolio

A portfolio is an archive of related work that is curated; that is, the items are collected, selected, framed, arranged, and discussed for particular purposes. Throughout your career, you may be asked to create many types of portfolios—ones related to work projects, periods of time, professional expertise, professional growth/performance, and so on. In English 1101 and English 1102, you will be asked to create one important type—a reflective portfolio—that will give you both experience in building a portfolio and a framework for extending this one and for later creating other types as well. Understanding the context and purpose of a portfolio helps you best showcase your own capabilities. When you hear people talk about portfolios or they ask you for a portfolio, you should ask for clarification: “What kind of portfolio are you talking about?” or “What kind of portfolio are you looking for?” or “How will you use the portfolio?”

Beyond the reflective portfolio you’ll complete for this class, you should develop and regularly update a professional communication portfolio that demonstrates your competence as a communicator in your field—your performance as a writer, speaker, designer, and collaborator. As part of your professional development, this portfolio can showcase your accomplishments in communication, including work selected from this course, a technical communication course, and other courses (as well as internships, co-ops, summer jobs, and study abroad programs). Instructors and advisers can help you to select and assess artifacts that show your development as a communicator.

Self-portraits painted by Rembrandt van Rijn (1630), Paul Gauguin (1889), and Vincent van Gogh (1889). Notice the contrasting styles. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Why Do Self-assessing & Showcasing Accomplishments in Communication Matter?

Self-assessment is an important skill, enabling you to identify your strengths and determine areas for improvement. Historically, critical self-appraisal has been a common practice among professionals—from artists to scientists, athletes to musicians, and architects to engineers. Self-assessment requires seeing yourself and your capabilities honestly. Take a quick look at the visual self-assessments above—self-portraits by famous artists that each believed captured their essences. Your self-assessment of your communication competence will be similarly distinctive.

Advancing in your career often depends on your ability to self-assess your capabilities and performance. Your self-assessment in English 1101 and English 1102 will focus on your communication competence, using the Writing and Communication Program common feedback chart presented earlier in this chapter. Self-assessment for your English 1101 and English 1102 reflective portfolio involves three critical components:

  1. Selecting, identifying, and analyzing your best multimodal artifacts
  2. Reflecting on how you developed those artifacts from early to final drafts, what you were trying to accomplish, and whether you achieved these goals
  3. Presenting your work and reflection to demonstrate your achievement for yourself, your instructor, and other outside audiences, including potential employers

The ultimate purpose of developing a portfolio is to transfer what you learn from one assignment to the next assignment, from one course to the next course, and from your courses to your career.

How Does a Reflective Communication Portfolio Help to Transfer Learning?

The reflections about your processes and artifacts that give your portfolio coherence are perhaps even more important than the artifacts themselves. Reflecting on your work prompts you to identify patterns in your performance and to consider the ways in which these patterns might apply to your future communication. Identifying patterns helps you to see your strengths, which you can develop further, as well as areas you can concentrate on improving.

For example, when you reflect on designing a research poster, you might notice that you have a tendency to omit subheadings that could help viewers to understand your argument. Identifying this tendency necessarily encourages you to focus on subheadings when you revise any poster—or perhaps any other type of artifact. Thus, reflection enables you to transfer what you learned during the specific poster assignment to situations you are likely to encounter both in the classroom and in the workplace.

In a portfolio, the quality of evidence (what you did) is as important as the reflection (why you did it). Reflection always begins with evidence, but it never ends there. You should identify not only what you did, but why you did it in relationship to the outcomes of the course.

English 1101 and English 1102 require you to create a reflective portfolio of multimodal works and reflective essays at the end of each semester; some of these items might later become part of your overall professional communication portfolio. You may also choose to continue developing your portfolio in other classes, in your internships and co-ops, and in your other campus and community activities. Pursuing self-assessment while maintaining an organized record of your work in your reflective portfolio creates a resource that you can easily draw from to build your professional portfolio, sharing your accomplishments and advancing your career.

What Is the English 1101 or 1102 Portfolio & How Does It Enhance My Education?

English 1101 and 1102 both emphasize the composition of research-based multimodal arguments through a rigorous, rhetorically sensitive, and reflective process designed to teach the habits of effective communication. Each section of 1101 and 1102 also has additional, theme-specific course outcomes that are indicated in your course syllabus. At Georgia Tech, all students in English 1101 and English 1102 are required to submit multimodal portfolios that reflect their work in each course. The end-of-semester portfolio is in lieu of a final exam for the course. You should design it as a culminating, representative, and reflective example of your overall performance in the course.

The portfolio serves two purposes for your learning:

  1. It enables you to document the ways in which your efforts meet the stated course goals.
  2. It requires you to reflect on your learning during the semester, which research indicates will improve your ability to transfer these skills to other situations.

During the semester, you will spend some time working on your portfolio (the amount of time varies from professor to professor). At the end of the semester, you will write a self-review essay and select evidence from the artifacts you have produced in this course; then, you will describe and make an argument about the ways in which each artifact demonstrates your ability to apply the concepts and skills taught in this course. The directions for submitting the portfolio may be slightly different for each class, so students should follow the instructions provided by their professor. However, each successful portfolio will contain these items:

  1. A self-review essay (sometimes referred to as the “reflective introduction” or “reflective essay”) that introduces and analyzes the portfolio
  2. A series of short-answer reflections that address questions about each individual artifact
  3. Your diagnostic project that you created during the first week of the course
  4. Three artifacts that, taken together, best reflect your work and development in the course, and a series of documents demonstrating your process in designing each artifact

As you prepare your work and begin to think reflectively, you may wish to consider the following questions:

  1. What were the main intellectual goals of the assignment? (Think about the goals in terms of the course theme and in terms of the communication strategies you were to learn or practice.)
  2. What is your argument or purpose? How did you make the argument or purpose visible and persuasive in your artifact?
  3. Who is the intended audience for your artifact? Why is this an appropriate audience? How is your choice of audience reflected in the artifact you created?
  4. What are the defining features of the genre or media that you are using in this project? How, specifically, do you make use of these features?
  5. If you had more time for revision, what would you change and why?

Throughout the semester, you’ll be collecting your best and most interesting work to include in your communication portfolio. Part of being able to complete a reflective portfolio necessitates saving copies of your drafts so that you can comment on your development. In order to comment on these drafts, you need to consider a practice common among professionals. They seldom write over an old version of a document, replacing it with the new version. Instead, they save multiple versions of the document. So, for example, by the time a document such as an OpEd column is completed for a class assignment, your own folder for the assignment could reasonably include OpEd 9-15-19 ver 1, OpEd 9-17-19 ver 2, and OpEd 9-20-19 ver 3. Versions of various projects you complete are likely to include visuals (such as graphs, photos, or videos) and sound (such as voice-overs, music tracks, or podcasts). Having this archive of materials will be essential to creating your reflective portfolio. Careful labelling practices and regularly backing up your archive of materials are highly recommended practices for communicators of all levels.

You can find the full instructions for composing the portfolio at sites.gatech.edu/wcpportfolio.

Preventing Assignment Stress

Keeping up with lectures, homework, assignments, and projects for four or more classes across various disciplines can sometimes feel overwhelming. Following these tips offered by current juniors and seniors can help you reduce assignment stress.

Start early. Many Georgia Tech students are in the habit of completing assignments at the last minute. Although this strategy may have worked for assignments in high school, it’s not a good idea now. As a college student you now have added stress—taking harder classes, getting accustomed to new surroundings, juggling lectures and labs, and so on. By starting assignments early, you leave yourself time to revise and edit, ensuring your ideas are expressed clearly and correctly. The result will be increased insight, creativity, and accuracy, and higher grades.

Talk to your professors. Professors are not mind readers. When you are struggling with a class, your professor may not realize it until you have already submitted an assignment and earned a poor grade. The best way to prevent this from happening is to talk to your professor. If you regularly communicate with your professors, they will become your allies in helping you learn as much as possible and earn grades that reflect your best performance.

Plan your ideas. You can plan assignments in many ways. Some students outline key ideas or arguments they want to make. Others put key ideas on index cards—in sentences or paragraphs—and then treat the cards like a puzzle, arranging and rearranging them to find relationships among the ideas. Still others create idea maps and brainstorm as key parts of planning. Whatever method works best for you, plan—in your mind and on paper—before writing and designing. The lack of a plan will likely result in a paper, presentation, or visual that lacks consistency and coherence, thus reducing the accessibility, comprehensibility, and usability of your work. You will then create a product that doesn’t reflect your abilities and receive a grade that may disappoint you.

Use available campus resources. Georgia Tech has many offices, groups, and organizations that can assist you. Academic services include the Naugle Communication Center in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Center (see Chapter 1 for more), the Media Scholarship Commons in the library, the subject and media librarians, and 1-to-1 Tutoring. Services for health and wellness (emotional and physical) include Stamps Health Services and the Counseling Center. Advocacy offices that will support you include the Dean of Students’ office, the LGBTQIA Resource Center, and the Women’s Resource Center. All of these services can help you manage your work-life balance. You can reduce your stress by planning, varying, and balancing your academic and extracurricular activities. If you need a way to get started, visit the Student Affairs Web site to explore ways to get involved on campus. Using available campus resources will give you a more well-rounded and rewarding college experience.

Proofread carefully before submitting. The simplest way to improve the quality of your work and increase the likelihood of good grades is to proofread. Proofreading is a critical part of an assignment; it shows you care about the credibility and quality of your work. Because you spend so much time on your assignments, you can become too close to your work; over time, you may stop seeing what you actually wrote and instead see what you intended to write. Ask classmates, roommates, or friends to exchange proofreading responsibilities with you so that you read their work and they read yours. A fresh pair of eyes can often spot mistakes in grammar, mechanics, spelling, and style. Even so, make sure to proofread your work more than once before turning it in. This will result in higher-quality work that reflects your capabilities.

As you become accustomed to self-assessment of and reflection about your work, the categories in the Writing and Communication Program common feedback chart will become part of your process. You’ll find your confidence increasing and your performance improving. Ultimately, you’ll transfer and generalize what you learn in English 1101 and English 1102 to other communication situations.