What’s New in the Classroom: Holistic Assessment
The current issue of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (JALWD) has a number of interesting articles. In this post I want to discuss one particular article that really made me think about how I assess my students’ legal writing: Roger Klurfeld and Steven Placek’s article, “Rhetorical Judgments: Using Holistic Assessment to Improve the Quality of Administrative Decisions.”
In this piece, Klurfeld and Placek describe their work to help improve the quality of written decisions issued by the National Appeals Division of the United States Department of Agriculture. Their observations and experience make me wonder whether a holistic, reliability-tested approach to assessing student writing would improve the students’ learning experience and the overall quality of their writing.