Abstract:

The College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNAQ), the premiere technical college of Qatar, provides technical education for approximately 2500 students (70% Qatari and 30% other Arab nationalities). It is unique in the Middle East, a college from a Canadian model, providing elite technical training for the Engineering, Information Technology, Business, and Health sectors of Qatar. Students in the four schools have completed the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) program but still struggle with using the basics of grammar and language construction for communicating effectively. The Communications Department at CNAQ, part of the School of Language Studies and Academics, continually deals with the challenge of developing students to be effective writers. As challenging as it is to develop writing skills, it is equally challenging to develop effective assessment instruments to evaluate writing.

The challenge faced by the assessment team of the Communications Department at CNAQ was to provide authentic assessment of key writing tasks, particularly the final formal report of the CM2300 course, a fully researched formal report which was the capstone of the Communications Program. The assessment of this final piece was to reflect current research regarding assessment of writing tasks, and had to be meaningful to students, efficient for instructors, and provide a scored assessment required by each of the schools at CNAQ.

The assessment design which evolved demonstrated the interdependency and interaction between pedagogy, instructors and learners, current research regarding assessment, and the collaboration of the assessment team and the entire Communications Department for the co-construction of an assessment tool that proved to be effective.

The process began by the formation of an assessment team during the May/June Intersession, 2011, who researched current writing assessment practices and developed a writing rubric. Several ‘norming’ iterations followed to develop consistency (reliability) of the assessment tool amongst instructors, and further norming sessions were held in the Winter Session, 2012, soliciting input from students on the assessment rubric and to seek student feedback on the assessment tool in order to empower them in understanding the assessment process. .

The result of the project produced a writing assessment rubric which satisfied the needs of college instructors to fairly and accurately evaluate student writing, and in the process gave students a better understanding of how to self-assess and improve their own writing.