Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading By Sarah Klotz And Kristina Reardon

Contract grading has widely been embraced in first-year college writing classrooms, which has necessitated new types of responses to writing. Engagement-based assessment criteria such as contract grading do not require a professor's responses as a primary concern for student writers while revising their work. With this in mind, first-year writing students under contract grading ought to focus on feedback from their peer writing fellows which could guarantee their success in the course. The study discussed in the article "Crafting a Writing Response Community Through Contract Grading" by Sarah Klotz and Kristina Reardon entails a follow-up on 24 students across two first-year writing sections held in Fall of 2020. Each section of 12 students

It has been viewed from a holistic assessment point of view that emphasizes the evaluation of students' labor and processes. Grading contracts are utilized in the holistically assessing of work, assigning grades, outlining requirements to make certain grades, and in the enhancement of student motivation to undertake personal responsibilities for their assigned tasks while at the same time fostering democratic social engagement in the classroom. Students are included in curriculum development as well as assessment practices. According to Klotz and Reardon, contract grading is a form of assessment that draws away the concept of teachers as determinants of qualities of student writing and shifts the focus to the reward of student labor and promotion of student engagement in the writing process. In their article, grading agreements may favor neurotypical, normative students if they fail to recognize that one's ability to work does not always match their willingness to do so due to factors such as disability, class, and alternative personified and social orientation that converge with racial formation (Klotz and Reardon 109). This analysis asserts how engagement-based grading contracts give value to feedback-seeking practices. The discussion also delves into the role of writing fellows in student writing processes which

Among these 22 students, 19 were comfortable working with writing fellows, with an average of 2.2 meetings (Klotz and Reardon 111). Most of the students striving to get an A opted to meet with their writing fellows, whereby these meetings laid the foundation for their revision. 74% of the session notes entailed detailed feedback on the revision plan regarding making notable changes beyond proofreading. Most of them also worked with their work fellows in the writing process. Further analysis shows that about 15 (75%) of them asserted that their writing fellows were paramount in their writing process, and about 6 (30%) of them indicated how they had built supportive relationships with their writing fellows (Klotz and Reardon 112). These findings indicate how an engagement-based grading contract results in a stronger writing process that fosters iterative feedback. The greatest benefit is students' ability to create an ideal set of revision and feedback-seeking practices that will go beyond first-year