The Portfolio and Self-Assessment

Due December 20^th

This is the final day of the semester. No work may be submitted beyond this date.

The Portfolio and Self-Assessment (required in all sections of composition) are in many ways the most important documents that you’ll create for this class. For many of you, this will be familiar from Engl 110. Assembling the Portfolio will help you to see your progress as a writer over the course of the semester, and the Self-Assessment will give you the chance to evaluate that work based on your own criteria as well as the course learning objectives.

The Portfolio                         

The Portfolio should include, at a minimum, your Technical Description, Memo Assignment, Lab Report, and Engineering Proposal, as well as a page containing all of your journal entries.

In addition to providing polished versions of your essays, you might want to include drafts of essays, examples from homework, peer reviews, etc. To demonstrate that your drafting process has changed, you might want to include a draft from an early and a late assignment that illustrate changes in your drafting process. In order to better orient readers of your Portfolio, you’ll also need to compose introductions to (or abstracts for) each of the documents you showcase, including your major essays.A few sentences will do.

The portfolio will be housed on CUNY’s Academic Commons, the same site that you have used for your journal entries over the course of this semester. Be aware of the privacy settings, and make sure that commons users can view your site. While the arrangement/design 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.

The Self-Assessment (3 pages double spaced)

The Self-Assessment is a kind of short research paper, but in this case 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. This piece should answer two questions: To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives (below)? In what ways have my perceptions on what writing is and doesevolved this semester? This essay will thus provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate how you’ve developed as a writer this semester and will serve as an introduction to your Portfolio.

*You may wish to make this Self-Assessment the landing page for your site, or you may want to make a welcome page (you may use our course site as a model for this).

The learning objectives you should address are:

1. acknowledge your and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
2. enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
3. negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations
4. develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
5. engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond
6. formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing
7. practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
8. strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

The Self-Assessment and Portfolio will notbe evaluated on whether or not you have achieved the goals, but on how well you demonstrate your progress and express yourself through writing and presentation. Most of all, you should articulate how your personal perceptions have evolved regarding the question, “What is writing?”

 

Grading

Below are the criteria I will use to assess your final work. You may want to use this as checklist before you submit.

Self-Assessment:

1. Have you addressed all of the course learning objectives, even those that you feel you did not spend enough time working on?
2. Have you articulated explicitly the ways in which your perceptions of writing have evolved? (Addressed the “what is writing” question).
3. Have you provided evidence, in the form of your own writing and specific learning moments, that you have developed as a writer? Are you able to identify areas in which you have not progressed, and articulated why?
4. Have you effectively revised and edited your writing? (Free of errors, typos, etc.)

Portfolio

• Is your portfolio design simple and easy to navigate?
• Does your portfolio contain all 4 major assignments + journal entries?
• Have you maintained consistency from one page to the next?
• Have you used color and contrast to make things simple for your reader?
• Have you considered font and page layout to create a neat, easy to read text?

 

Sample Portfolios

Below are two sample portfolios from past classes, that you may uses as references/models for designing your own portfolio (not: the assignments these portfolios present may vary from those we have done in this class)

https://russellenglish.commons.gc.cuny.edu

https://humayunkabir.commons.gc.cuny.edu