Assessing Higher Order Thinking and Communication Skills in College Graduates through Writing.

Abstract

One of the root problems in assessing communications skills in writing is the wide variety of definitions, often unstated, that lead to different conceptions of what is being measured. These different definitions emerge from the complicated sequence of learning writing. The young child must learn such matters as the formation of letters, the system of writing from left to right on the line, and the spelling of words. Later on, the student will increase vocabulary, learn more complex sentence structures, create poems or stories, and begin to write about ideas. Still later, more advanced students construct paragraphs, essays, and research papers ; learn to evaluate other peoples' ideas and incor porate them into their own arguments; and use writing as a cen tral means of learning through discovery and criticism. All the earlier skills are necessary as part of the more developed skills. Yet, as the learner advances, the skills do not merely de velop; they take on a different shape and a wholly different source. The early skills are basically imitative: we must learn to spell and punctuate the way other people do, and we are taught the language forms of people we want to emulate. That is, the less sophisticated communication skills are a form of etiquette, based on the need to conform, and dependent upon socializa tion. But the more sophisticated skills depart from imitation and conformity. We do not want original spelling or punctua tion (though we often get them, at all levels), but we do want original thinking and independent critical problem solving as part of higher-order thinking skills. This difference between