Week 6: February 13 - Teaching Technical and Professional Communication

Topic: Assessment and Feedback

Read for Class:

For Still & Koerber and Taylor, be certain that you read the methods and the results. Skim the rest.

- - Still, B., & Koerber, A. (2009). Listening to students: A usability evaluation of instructor commentary. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 24(2), 206-233.
  - Taylor, S. S. (2011). Really don’t know what he meant by that: How well do engineering students understand teachers’ comments on their writing? Technical Communication Quarterly, 20(2), 139.
  - Singleton and Meloncon (*.doc)
  - Allen, J. (2010). Mapping institutional values and the technical communication curriculum: A strategy for grounding assessment. In M. Hundleby & J. Allen (Eds.), Assessment in technical and professional communication (pp. 39-56). Amityville, NY: Baywood. (pdf file and definitely just skim.)

Do for class:

- - do some research on your own and bring to class what you feel is a really good source on rubrics, e.g., why you may create one, how you create one, how you use it. You can pick a single angle or choose to go more broad. The key here is to research.
  - look through the textbook reviews posted here in a Google drive folder with the intent of looking at them as research artifacts. Kind of like we did with the “good writing responses” make some notes on common ideas.
  - coding assignments: it is a list from an ongoing project of common assignments. These are from a series of professional/technical writing courses. Your job is to start coding them. To do quantitative analysis (what’s the most common assignment), the qualitative data has to be made quantitative and that’s done by assigning a common code to like things. So even if someone calls the resume and cover letter two separate assignments, it’s actually one (that’s a cleaning of the data move) and then it can be coded something that you can remember and is descriptive (e.g., job). Just like the various types of reports could all be coded reports. Don’t do them all, but do at least 75 of them to get the feel on how this sort of research work works. (file was emailed to you)

In class:

Guest speaker: Sara Doan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee