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Final Portfolio Evaluation Questions (with explanations) (These questions are used in Lennie Irvin's Freshman Composition I classes and were influenced by the Learning Record Online.) 1. What were the other two essays you selected for the portfolio (other than the Ezine essay)? Discuss why you selected these writing pieces? What do you feel they demonstrate about your writing and about you as a writer? 2. Discuss and interpret your experience with rhetoric this semester-evaluate your experience writing for an audience with a specific purpose in mind. Rhetoric is a ten dollar word for writing for an audience with a specific purpose in mind. The Illustrative, How To, and Ezine essays particularly asked you to think in terms of what your "desired effect was on an intended audience," but other writing in the course (especially peer response) involved audience and purpose as well. What have you learned about writing for an audience with a specific purpose in mind? How has it changed and evolved your sense of writing and of your sense of yourself as a writer? 3. Discuss, interpret, and evaluate your performance and experience with revision in the class. We did a lot of revision in the class, or at least there were many opportunities to revise. The Family story was revised three times before it went in the Book. The Illustrative Essay and Ezine essay were revised twice even before you might have revised them again for the Portfolio. What have you learned about how to "revise" a text to improve it. 4. Discuss, interpret, and evaluate your performance and experience in the class in terms of technology. Using computers to write has been at the heart of our class all semester. Evaluate your performance not only in using computers to write, but to share your writing, and to expand your knowledge (which you might use in your writing). Some describe writing with computers as a new "literacy." How "literate" are you now with using computers to write? How has the technology expanded (or not expanded) your skills as a writer?
Working together on our writing has been a big part of each of our essays. We have shared brainstorming (invents), ideas (interchange), and drafts (peer response) in almost every essay we have written. Discuss the value of collaboration to your writing. Discuss how you have contributed to collaboration and what effect helping others has had on you? 6. How has your confidence and independence as a writer grown or not grown this semester? Confidence and independence in our own reading, writing, and thinking abilities. We see growth and development when learners' confidence and independence become coordinated with their actual abilities and skills, content knowledge, use of experience, and reflectiveness about their own learning. It is not a simple case of "more (confidence and independence) is better." The overconfident student who has relied on faulty or underdeveloped skills and strategies learns to ask for help when facing an obstacle; the shy student begins to trust her own abilities and begins to work alone at times, or to insist on presenting her own point of view in discussion. In both cases, students develop along the dimension of confidence and independence. 7. What skills and strategies have you developed? Discuss, interpret, evaluate your performance and experience in terms of the skills and strategies for writing covered in the class. Specific skills and strategies involved in composing and communicating effectively, from concept to organization to polishing grammar and correctness, and including technological skills for computer communication. Skills and strategies represent the "know-how" aspect of learning. When we speak of "performance" or "mastery," we generally mean that learners have developed skills and strategies to function successfully in certain situations. 8. Discuss, interpret, evaluate your performance and experience in the area of reflection in the class. Reflection refers to our developing awareness of our own learning process, as well as more analytical approaches to reading, writing, and communication. When we speak of reflection as a crucial component of learning, we are not using the term in its commonsense meaning of reverie or abstract introspection. We are referring to the development of the learner's ability to step back and consider a situation critically and analytically, with growing insight into his or her own learning processes, a kind of metacognition. Learners need to develop this capability in order to use what they are learning in other contexts, to recognize the limitations or obstacles confronting them in a given situation, to take advantage of their prior knowledge and experience, and to strengthen their own performance. 9. Please reconsider your involvement in the Process Journals and other reflective activities more specifically. What value did writing these reflective pieces have for you as you wrote them? What did you get out of reading the Process Journals of others. If you didn't participate in these reflective activities (either reading or writing), why?
Two of our essays have involved research--the Definition Essay and the Ezine. The goal of these essays was to initiate you into writing using sources. How have you done at incorporating other's ideas into your writing? What have you learned about using the library and web for research? Have you learned how to document your sources? In the future, do you feel like you know what to do when given a research writing assignment? 11. What do you believe
you will walk away with from this class? Where do you think you will continue
to develop in your writing? What have you learned in this class that will
be useful for you in two months or even in ten years?
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