Reflecting on Assessment: Strategies and Tools for Measuring the Impact of a Canadian WAC Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the process and tools we have developed for assessing the impact of writing development projects carried out in a wide variety of courses at our university. It begins with an overview of writing studies in Canada to provide context for our approach to writing instruction and writing program assessment. It then offers a case study of a specific writing development project in a large first-year humanities course, a detailed explanation of the methods we used to measure the efficacy of that project, and an exposition of the way in which this assessment was used to drive reflection on the project and enhancement of it. The paper concludes with summary of the lessons we have learned regarding writing program assessment that navigates between creating a standardized process and responding to the unique needs of multiple projects, as well as a discussion of the benefits of such assessment for writing pedagogy research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".