Portfolio Assignment English 110 FIQWS FA18 (downloadable .docx)

English 110 and FIQWS Portfolio and Self-Assessment Assignment

Fall 2018

The portfolio and self-assessment 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; the self-assessment will give you the chance to evaluate that work based on your own criteria as well as the course learning outcomes.

The Self-Assessment will provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate that you’ve understood the rhetorical terms that we’ve been working with all semester—rhetorical situation, purpose, audience, genre, stance, and media—and an introduction to your portfolio. The portfolio should include, at a minimum, the Literacy Narrative, the Exploratory Essay, and the Researched Critical Analysis. Feel free to add additional documents to the portfolio, depending on what you need to demonstrate that you’ve understood the rhetorical terms and met the course learning outcomes. You might want to include drafts of essays, examples of your discussion board posts, your peer reviews, or something else not listed here. The Self-Assessment allows you to evaluate your work based not only on your own criteria but also on your learning outcomes. Here are the Course Learning Outcomes:

• Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
• Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
• Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.
• 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.
• Practice systematic application of citation conventions.

In the self-assessment, you’ll demonstrate to me and to anyone else who looks at your portfolio that you have (or have not) understood the rhetorical terms and achieved these goals. The portfolio will not be evaluated on whether or not you have achieved the goals, but on how well you demonstrate your understanding of the rhetorical concepts and the goals that you have understood and achieved and your thoughts about the goals that you have not achieved.

To demonstrate that you have developed “reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing,” you would want to include, perhaps, annotations from your bibliography or copies of the notes you took while reading to demonstrate that you have developed flexible strategies for reading. To demonstrate that your drafting process has changed, you might want to include (and refer to in your Self-Assessment) a draft from an early and a late assignment that demonstrate changes in your drafting process. To demonstrate that you have engaged in the collaborative and social aspects of writing, you might include in your portfolio a peer review that you wrote and one that you received. You would then describe these reviews, and their significance, in your Self-Assessment. Use this same approach for all of the Course Learning Outcomes. The Self-Assessment 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, you’ll be referring to the works you’ve included in your portfolio.

Your discussion of the rhetorical terms will be up to you. You might want to devote a section of your self-assessment to this subject alone, or you might want to weave individual concepts—audience, for example—into a discussion of one of your essays that strongly demonstrates the concept.

The portfolio will be housed on CUNY’s Academic Commons. Be aware of the privacy settings, and make your choices according to your own comfort level. 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.

Assessment Rubric

While you won’t be asked to assess your own Self-Assessment, you should be aware of the criteria that I’ll use when I assess it.

• Have you addressed all of the course learning outcomes, even those that you feel you did not spend enough time working on?
• Have you provided evidence, in the form of your own writing, 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?
• Have you edited the Self-Assessment for typographical and grammatical errors?
• In your portfolio design, have you maintained consistency from one page to the next? Is your portfolio design simple and easy to navigate? Have you used color and contrast to make things simple for your reader?