Journal of Writing Assessment

Faculty evaluation of student learning artifacts is a critical activity as accrediting bodies call for campuses to promote "cultures of assessment." Also important are opportunities for faculty engagement and development that assessment projects provide. However, such projects come with significant challenges to facilitators and faculty scorers themselves. Faculty bring their own expertise and beliefs about student learning and writing to the assessment context, all of which can have emotional valence. Assessment sessions may emphasize faculty scoring to components of a rubric, perhaps eliminating a holistic score from the conversations because holistic scores are not viewed as actionable data points and thus are often not parts of the rubric (McConnell & Rhodes, 2017). As actionable data and reliability among scorers are emphasized in assessment, and holistic scores fall away, are we losing an important scoring tool by removing a place for assessment scorers to log their overall responses to the work that they are evaluating? This exploratory study reports scorers' use of an "overall response" category, added to the rubric in two assessment projects. Results indicate that faculty found the new category helpful, not just in managing their emotional responses, but also in leveraging their emotions to complete the scoring task. Correlation and regression analyses also suggest that scorers maintained orthogonal scoring across rubric categories.