Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

This is a series of blogposts  meant for students  who are in courses using grading contracts of some kind to determine their final course grades, or those who just want to understand better what grades are, what they do in classrooms, and how they effect learning. This is the  second  post in a series of five blogposts  meant to address questions about grading and grading contracts. If you're a teacher (or an inquisitive student), you might look at my  Labor-Based Grading Contracts Resources  page.  This series is a collaboration with the really awesome podcast,  Pedagogue   ( @_Pedagogue_ ) with Shane Wood. You can listen to me reading this blogpost at Pedagogue , or use the widget below. But maybe you just want to read it on your own below, or follow along.   Pedagogue · Pedagogue & Infrequent Words: Why Does Conventional Grading Feel So Unfair? *** Q2. Why Does Conventional Grading Feel So Unfair?...

Auckland, New Zealand I'm heading off tomorrow to Auckland, New Zealand to present at the Symposium on Second Language Writing conference at AUT University. My colleague, Kelvin Keown, and I will present an on-going study that we're doing that looks at the effects of the material conditions of multilingual writers in upper-division W-courses (writing in the major courses) on their use of feedback on their writing. Perhaps on my return, I'll give a bit of that presentation here and the feedback we received from those who participated in our session. For the rest of this post, I'd like to pose a few pedagogical questions to writing teachers, questions I've been thinking about recently while doing workshops and talks at various places on antiracist classroom writing assessment practices. At such events, I urge writing teachers to consider ways to explicitly cultivate antiracist agendas in their writing assessments. I explain the two main assumptions a teacher mi...

Recently, I read Linda B. Nilson's   Specializations Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time  (2015). It is pitched to a broad set of university courses and faculty, and not directly about assessing or grading writing or writing courses; however, she does use several examples of assessing writing, and she includes writing courses in the larger purposes she has for the book. I don't intend this post to be a full review of the book, but because the book does speak directly to faculty who wish to improve the way they teach and evaluate writing in their courses, I wish to offer a limited response to the book, and an encouragement to go get the book and read it, despite a few reservations I have about some things in it. Some Things Worth Looking Thinking About There are several valuable things any writing teacher (or teacher who assigns and must assess writing in her courses) can take from this book. The first is her convincing argument in c...