Portfolio and Self-Assessment Essay
The Portfolio and Self-Assessment Essay are in many ways the most important documents that you’ll create for this class. Assembling the Portfolio will help you to see your progress as a writer over the course of the semester, and the Self-Assessment Essay will give you the chance to evaluate that work based on your own criteria as well as the course learning objectives.
The Portfolio
The Portfolio should include, at a minimum, the Informative Review Essay, Position Essay, Research Proposal, Research Paper, and Self-Assessment Essay. Please submit edited versions of your work. Meaning, you should review all corrections and feedback you received from me on your papers before including them in your portfolio. You should also include any additional documents (or portions of documents) you composed over the semester that help you demonstrate the extent to which you’ve met the course learning objectives and developed your understanding in the sciences.
For instance, in addition to providing polished versions of your essays, you might want to include drafts of essays, examples from homework, peer reviews, etc. Or, you may want to include copies of your annotations of course texts or copies of the notes you took while reading to demonstrate that you have developed strategies for critical reading. To demonstrate that your drafting process has changed, you might want to include a draft from an early and a late assignment that illustrate changes in your drafting process. In order to better orient readers of your Portfolio, you’ll also need to compose introductions to (or abstracts for) each of the documents you showcase, including your major essays. Use this same approach for all of the Course Learning Objectives. (Be mindful that the documents you choose to include in your Portfolio should be referenced in your Self-Assessment Essay, which is further explained below. You will describe the documents, and their significance, in your essay. Thus, you’ll need to be very choosy in selecting which documents best represent your learning and development as a writer and be ready to refer to and analyze them in the Self-Assessment Essay.)
The portfolio will be housed on CUNY Academic Commons https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/, which uses a WordPress platform. Your portfolio will be secure in a non-commercial space under a CUNY domain. The portfolio will be read by me, some members of the class, and other CCNY faculty and administrators. While the arrangement of the Portfolio is up to you, it should be easy to navigate. As with any Web site, you want to be able to find what you’re looking for without any interference. This might mean scanning handwritten notes, taking screenshots of annotated Web sites, and turning your essays into .PDFs or Web texts.
The Self-Assessment Essay
The Self-Assessment Essay is a kind of research paper. Your development as a writer is the subject and the writing itself is your evidence. As you write your Self-Assessment Essay, you’ll be referring to the works you’ve included in your Portfolio. This essay answers two questions: To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives? In what ways have my perceptions on what writing is and does evolved this semester? This essay will thus provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate how you’ve developed as a writer this semester and will serve as an introduction to your Portfolio.
Here are the Course Learning Objectives: Over the course of the semester, you will:
- Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
- Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
- Negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation
- Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
- Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
- Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.
- Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
- Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)
The Self-Assessment Essay and Portfolio will not be evaluated on whether or not you have achieved the goals, but on how well you demonstrate your understanding of the goals that you have achieved and your thoughts about the goals that you have not achieved. It will be up to you how to incorporate your response to how your perceptions have evolved regarding the question, “What is writing?” You might want to devote a section of your Self-Assessment Essay to this subject alone, or you might want to weave this discussion into other parts.
Grading Rubric
- While you won’t be asked to assess your own Self-Assessment Essay, you should be aware of the criteria that I’ll use when I assess it.
- Have you addressed all of the course learning objectives, even those that you feel you did not spend enough time working on? (10 pts)
- Have you articulated explicitly the ways in which your perceptions of writing have evolved? (20 pts)
- Have you provided evidence, in the form of your own writing and specific learning moments, that you have developed as a writer? Are you able to identify areas in which you have not progressed, either because you didn’t spend enough time with them or you feel that you had a strong start in those areas? (20 pts)
- Have you effectively revised and edited your four major essays? (30 pts)
- Is your portfolio design effective and appropriate for digital audiences? (20 pts) In other words:
– Is your portfolio design simple and easy to navigate?
– Have you maintained consistency from one page to the next?
– Have you used color and contrast to make things simple for your reader?
– Have you considered font and page
