Assessing Interdisciplinary Writing

Since its inception thirty years ago, Miami University's School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS) has required a significant writing project of all its seniors. Our students use the thesis assignment to address a topic "that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession" (Klein and Newell 1998, 3). To do this effectively, students must understand the limitations and strengths of at least two disciplinary fields. They must take the additional steps of synthesis and application-that is, they must explore how insights from those fields can be combined or integrated to respond to an issue or problem. As long-time faculty in this program, we were perplexed by the difficulty of advising students on the thesis process and by the lower-than-expected quality of the final products. To remedy these problems, our faculty devised a four-year, sequenced writing curriculum in 1996 (Haynes forthcoming; IIaynes 1996). Because we offer our majors a core curriculum with courses offered each semester of their undergraduate experience, the faculty decided to sequence our writing goals across all four years. In this plan, students progress from engagement with expressive modes to an increasingly critical awareness of and proficiency in disciplinary forms to the development of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry. The plan starts with the fundamentals of the writing process and, in the first two years, students analyze and compare the rhetoric of various disciplines. The plan culminates in an integrative capstone experience in the senior year. Miami University is not alone in seeking to provide integrative experiences-particularly integrative capstone experiences that synthesize general education and study in the major. Many two- and four-year institutions have created interdisciplinary courses, departments, programs, learning communities, and research centers. Yet, the burgeoning field of assessment has not kept pace with the explosion of interdisciplinary initiatives in recent years. The Interdisciplinary Writing Assessment Profiles Recognizing the need for theoretically grounded, empirically reliable ways of assessing interdisciplinary writing, the Association for Integrative Studies commissioned the creation of an instrument to assess expository, research-based interdisciplinary writing at the undergraduate level. In researching the assessment literature, we discovered few articles on the assessment of interdisciplinary learning. In response, we created the Interdisciplinary Writing Assessment Profiles (Wolfe and Haynes forthcoming), a scoring rubric designed to assess interdisciplinary writing for the purpose of improving teaching and learning. When applied to a large set of essays with comparisons made over time or, perhaps, among institutions, it can also be used to assess interdisciplinary programs. In applying interdisciplinary theory to writing assessment, we identified four dimensions of interdisciplinary writing: (1) drawing on disciplinary sources; (2) critical argumentation; (3) multidisciplinary perspectives; and (4) interdisciplinary integration. Each paper receives a score from one to seven on each of these dimensions, and a detailed set of procedures is used to create a profile for each project. The first two dimensions focus primarily on elements that should occur in disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary expository writing. The final two dimensions are more pointedly focused on interdisciplinary writing. Including all four dimensions lets us clearly demarcate the traits that are indicative of interdisciplinary writing and to diagnose problems related to both disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions of writing. (See page 13 for an abbreviated summary of the positive and negative source elements for each of the four dimensions.) Reliability and Validity We conducted a small empirical research study to assess the validity and reliability of the Interdisciplinary Writing Assessment Profiles (IWrAP). …