Traditional and non-traditional assessments.

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Traditional methods of assessing a student's writing skills usually have the student producing a written document which can be a few paragraphs or a few pages depending on the writing prompt. More than likely these traditional methods are done at the end of a unit or chapter. Basically the instructor gives the student a prompt or subject to write about. The instructor also gives the length of the assignment such as a few paragraphs or 2 to 3 pages. Following traditional writing methods the student starts off with an introduction paragraph which tells what the writing piece will be about, the body or the story and then the conclusion paragraph which wraps up the story. The instructor then reads the story, decides if the student has mastered the subject or not, jots a few brief notes to the student, scores the writing, grades it, hands the piece back to the student and then moves on to another subject. This type of writing and scoring does not allow the student a chance to take the instructor's advice and improve upon that particular piece of writing. Instead this traditional method of assessing only gives the student a few notes of advice without allowing the student a chance to rewrite the paper using their instructors' advice. One of the strengths to this traditional method is it does allow the student a chance at different writing genres instead of staying on one topic or subject until the student has the topic or subject mastered.
Evaluations for traditional writing methods can be done with short quizzes or tests and may have a variety of multiple choice, true/false, essay's, fill in the blanks or short answers. Many times traditional assessment quizzes or tests are used to measure a student's comprehension and listening skills rather than their true writing abilities. ...