However, this short assignment is different in style and is helping you prepare for the sort of thinking and writing you will need to do at the end of this semester when you prepare your final portfolio for assessment.

I realize that this assignment might feel a LOT like your end-of-unit reflections, and I apologize for that. However, this short assignment is different in style and is helping you prepare for the sort of thinking and writing you will need to do at the end of this semester when you prepare your final portfolio for assessment.
Assessment is the act of reviewing your performance in a course in order to discover or notice what you have learned or know. This short assessment assignment asks you to review the work you have done up until the point in the term and to find places in that work where you have shown your achievement of some of the learning outcomes for this course.
First a quick word about learning outcomes. Every course you take has (or ought to have) a list of “learning outcomes” on the syllabus. This is the list of things the professor is aiming to help you learn during the course of the semester. Some of the learning outcomes might be things you simply learn once and then remember forever, while others – and this is true for English writing courses – are things you practice and revisit repeatedly, getting better at them each time. Here is the list of learning outcomes (LOs) from our syllabus:
I. Rhetorical knowledge|
Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze the contexts, audiences, and power relationships in texts.
In this course, students will learn to:
Apply basic rhetorical concepts in reading and composing texts. Commonly considered essential concepts include genre, author, audience, purpose, setting/exigence.
Compose in several genres in order to understand how conventions shape readers’ and writers’ practices, purposes, and expectations.
Apply citation conventions in one’s own writing, and reflect on why these conventions exist and how they are used in different genres and contexts.
II. Critical writing & reading |
Critical writing & reading is the practice of deeply listening, analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, and evaluating ideas, information, situations, and texts in order to better understand their implications.
In this course, students will learn to:
Identify, through careful reading and listening, the relationships between assertion and evidence, patterns of organization, and strategic language choices.
Locate and evaluate research materials.
Compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from other texts.
III. The craft of writing & reading|
Writers use numerous strategies, or processes, to conceptualize, invent, develop, and refine projects, adapting their composing processes to different contexts and occasions.
In this course, students will learn to:
Develop a writing project through multiple versions and document one’s thinking and choices between those iterations/changes.
Select and use strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing.
Reflect on one’s own development and change as a writer and one’s emerging knowledge about the craft of writing, language choices, and language conventions.
We’re only just approaching the halfway mark in this course, so we wouldn’t expect to have worked on all of these LOs yet, but this midterm self-assessment assignment asks you to look back through the work you’ve done so far (it’s a LOT, btw) and locate assignments/places where you see that you’ve shown some proficiency in the LOs that I’ve highlighted in the list above. Those are the LOs that I believe we’ve been working with thus far in the course.
As you prepare to write your response to this midterm self-assessment, please look back through our course week folders and remind yourself of the different assignments you’ve done so far. Keep track of places where, in your own written work for the course – on Blackboard and/or on Perusall – you have been working on any of the highlighted LOs. In your written response to this IWA self-assessment, take the time to describe the assignments and places where you believe you have most clearly exhibited your work on each of the highlighted LOs.
This assignment requires a minimum of 200 words to be considered complete.