A holistic assessment of writing in design

This paper describes the authors' two-semester effort to integrate writing instruction into a multi-disciplinary sophomore engineering design course and their programmatic assessment approach. They employed a strategy that consisted of administering a pre and post-instruction in-class, un-graded writing activity that was blindly scored using holistic techniques by a group of diverse evaluators. The results of this assessment experiment: showed no growth in student writing as measured over a semester length of time; indicated that students' attitude about the assessment process can influence results; and pointed out problems with the development of good prompts. In addition, the calibration process used to train evaluators was most beneficial, yielding a consensus standard of performance that was applied to not only the pre- and post-tests evaluation, but also within the classroom.