Worcester State University, along with Fitchburg State University, Mount Wachusett Community College, and Quinsigamond Community College, has received a $12,000 grant from the Davis Foundation to support a collaborative student writing assessment project. The grant was awarded through the Department of Higher Education’s Advancing a Massachusetts Culture of Assessment initiative and was one of the six Davis Foundation grants awarded for assessment experiments.
The project, “Central Massachusetts Partnership to Assess Written Communication,” will focus on developing and implementing a model for assessing achievement levels in written communication as students progress through the first two years of their college education. A team of 12 faculty, three from each institution, will develop the model.
“We are committed to putting our students at the center of all we do,” said WSU President Barry M. Maloney. “This project will provide our students with the tools they need to be successful.”
The year-long project, commencing in January 2012, will compare the writing of entering first-year students to student writing at the end of second year. Four different scoring rubrics will be used, three generated by individual institutions plus the VALUE Rubric for writing communication, developed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The VALUE Rubrics are part of a national initiative to provide a Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education.