Teaching and Evaluating Student Writing

A Faculty of Arts & Science Teaching and Learning Community of Practice

Dual Delivery
In-Person, History Conference Room, Sidney Smith Hall, Room 2098, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3
Online, Register via Zoom

Marking Multilingual Students’ Writing Fairly
Leora Freedman, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, English Language Learning Coordinator, English Language Learning (ELL)
Daveeda Goldberg, Writing Instructor, New College, ELL Specialist

The English Language Learning (ELL) Program fields many questions from faculty and TAs about marking the writing of multilingual students. Markers frequently express concerns about maintaining fairness and responding effectively and efficiently to support language development. This presentation will showcase a new eModule developed by ELL for self-paced learning as well as use in departmental meetings and TA grading sessions. It is the first of a series of eModules called Teaching in Our Multilingual Environment. Participants will learn how they can make use of this growing collection of eModules for the benefit of their departments and courses.

Teaching Writing in the Age of Mechanical Content Production
David Suarez, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Philosophy
Alexandra Gustafson, Lead Writing TA, Graduate Student, Philosophy

Artificial neural networks, trained on vast quantities of text written by human beings, can now be used to produce coherent, grammatical content on demand. Machine learning tools of this kind, such as GPT-3, are widely available, cheap, and have been packaged for use by the general public. While these tools might not produce the best essays, they can produce text that stands a chance of passing high school, and perhaps even university-level, classes. (Refer to the GPT-3 article by Philosophy bear [https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/gpt-3-is-right-now-already-more-than] for discussion and examples.) This has implications for the writing projects we assign our students. We want to explore those implications, in both practical and theoretical dimensions, with an emphasis on pedagogical issues—in particular, thinking through the very point of writing assignments, and what we hope to teach using them.

The Faculty of Arts & Science Teaching & Learning Community of Practice (CoP) was established in 2015 to create a collegial forum for faculty and instructors to meet and share teaching practices and strategies across fields and disciplines. This CoP is coordinated by Andrew Dicks (Professor, Teaching Stream and Associate Chair, Undergraduate, Department of Chemistry).