Guiding Principles in Engineering Writing Assessment: Context, Collaboration, and Ownership

Several years ago, one of the authors of this chapter was privy to details of a large-scale writing assessment of junior high students. The students had been given a brief prompt asking them to think through how watching television affects people's thinking styles. One of the students involved in the assessment had approached the task creatively, beginning his essay as one would a television commercial and echoing that tone, complete with channel changes and other fragmenting interruptions. He began his essay this way: "Hi there! Television has not affected my mind ... " and then proceeded to show, in a sophisticated demonstration of self-satire, how television had indeed fragmented his mind. Most of the evaluators participating in the assessment were impressed at the level of thinking, awareness, and creativity that went into the student's writing sample.