assignment design – Writing Across the Curriculum

May 3, 2016

The Pedagogical Value of Failure

Failure and rejection are nothing new to academics. We are constantly pushed to re-assess our research and our teaching to determine what did not work and how we might change our approach to do better the next time. But it’s easy to forget this, in part because of the value that our meritocratic society places on success and the shame often associated with failure. “Failure is not an option” is a phrase that should be taken figuratively as a motivator, not literally as a deterrent. Yet many, in academia and beyond, see failure as a deterring force.

This is part of the reason why I was glad to see so many colleagues sharing this article from last week’s Washington Post. Ignore for a moment the headline, which was likely written to get clicks and not by the author, and its Schadenfreude-laced implication that it “feels good” to read about a successful person’s failures. And while there are huge problems with this sort of article specifically because, as a tenure-track professor at a school like Princeton the author is more secure in airing his failures than would be an adjunct professor scratching to get by, that is not the subject of this post.

The real value in this article, I believe, is that it reminds us that failure is an integral part of the academic process. We are asked to “revise and resubmit” our articles for peer-reviewed journals, we apply for dozens of grants, we apply for dozens of jobs when on the job market. If we’re lucky, we get one of those grants, one of those jobs, that article eventually gets accepted and published. But it’s only through the sometimes painful act of failing that we make our writing better, that our grant proposals become clearer, that we get better at interviewing and writing cover letters.

Which brings me to teaching. At WAC, we encourage faculty to scaffold their assignments, to make assignment prompts clear, to institute peer review, to assign more low-stakes writing, to comment less but with more thought on papers, to integrate active learning activities into the classroom. But what happens when the students’ work doesn’t improve? What happens when we have all these new structures in place but students fail to listen, to pay attention, to turn in those low-stakes assignments? What then?

In short, what do we do when our WAC pedagogy fails?

Recently, I heard an NPR story about grit, the buzzwordy idea that passion and perseverance are needed to attain your goals. Passion does not just mean excitement, it means “continuing engagement with a pursuit.” And perseverance, of course, means sticking with it, even when met with initial failure.

So be passionate about writing pedagogy. We know that it works, we have the research to support this. As teachers, we should continue to think about and foster the writing tools that we have developed. We should understand that the more we try to refine our assignments, the better off our students will be, and the better their writing will be (which, in turn, will make our lives easier come grading time). We should engage with the literature out there: find out if your field has a pedagogy journal (most do, either in print or online), and peruse journals on writing pedagogy such as College Composition and Communication or the WAC Journal.

And persevere. As the end of the semester approaches, consider doing some free-writing yourself about the effectiveness of your assignments this semester. What had the best results? What had the worst results? Why do you think you got the results that you did? Moving forward, tweak your assignments. See the places where your students got tripped up and try to address them at the root of the problem — in the assignment itself, in the structure of the syllabus. Did peer review fail? Perhaps it is an issue with the structure of the peer review, rather than the process itself. Did students fail to hand in scaffolded segments of an assignment on time? Consider incentivizing the work in a different way, or framing the importance of these assignments differently.

To borrow another motivational phrase from the world of sports, “never give up.” Don’t be afraid to fail, embrace it, and use it to improve and ultimately succeed.

September 28, 2015September 28, 2015

Workshop Recap: Effective Assignment Design

Last Thursday WAC kicked off the fall semester with our first workshop, Effective Assignment Design. For those who couldn’t make it, or those who want to refresh their memories, here’s a quick recap:

Writing Fellows Claire Hoogendoorn and Drew Fleming began by explaining the difference between formal and informal writing. Many of us are familiar with formal student writing, end-of semester term papers are a classic example, which can be categorized as writing to communicate. Informal writing is writing to learn and it can take any number of forms, including:

Notetaking
Paraphrase or summary
Generating questions
Reflection or response

What informal writing tasks have in common is that they are not focused on grammar or organization, and they are low-stakes (they are ungraded or have a minimal impact on the course grade).

An effectively designed formal assignment should include a number of smaller informal or semi-formal assignments that help students develop the required skills to achieve the grade they want. This is called scaffolding, and all high-stakes assignments can benefit from it.

Scaffolding will look different for each assignment and each instructor, the point is to put steps in place so that students practice the skills they will need to succeed before the final assignment comes due. This may mean giving informal assignments in which they defend a thesis, write out methodology, explain a key concept, or paraphrase a source. Again, the number and type will vary.

The workshop wrapped up with a reminder of how important it is to give students typed assignment handouts. Handouts minimize student confusion by providing all of the details of the assignment, such as:

The specific task(s)
The assignment requirements (such as formatting and citation)
The audience for the assignment
Grading criteria
How many required drafts

The workshop PowerPoint and handout can be found here:

PowerPoint Slides

Handout

Remember that this is workshop one of four offered this semester. Workshops are open to all faculty, regardless of whether they are going through the WAC certification process. If you are interested in hearing more about the WAC certification process (there are still some open spots in the program this semester) or if you have further questions about WAC, feel free to email a WAC Fellow or leave a comment below!

December 1, 2014November 29, 2014

Scenario-Based Homework Questions: Instructor Creativity Results in Student Creativity and Deeper Learning

Recently, Claire Hoogendoorn wrote about problem-focused activities in the classroom. The focus of this post is closely related to her insightful ideas. Scenario-based questions are homework or exam items that are based on real-life situations as opposed to abstract questions that pinpoint specific course content (e.g., terms, equations) without requiring students to link the content to its application. In my classrooms, they are effective due to the following reasons:

They’re more fun and interesting for the students to do.
Students’ answers to them are more fun and interesting for us as instructors to read.
Scenario-based questions are harder to plagiarize because they are creative in that they require more than a simple definition to answer them.
These items or questions require students to APPLY the concepts from your course instead of being satisfied with route memorization.
This question type leads to more critical thinking and active learning for students.

Below are a few scenario-based questions from my own courses that involve the above elements.

From Social Psychology:

Daniel is watching a television advertisement about a new brand of vitamins. He decides to buy them the next time he goes to the store because there’s a doctor and a professional athlete endorsing them in the advertisement so he figures it must be a great product. Which of the aspects of persuasion as discussed in class does his decision depend on? Defend your decision with a 3-5 sentence explanation.

From Statistics:

Scenario: An organization is interested in whether an employee’s job type (administrative assistant, salesperson, or research and development) impacts his or her perceptions of the organization’s culture.

Which is the dependent variable?
Which is the quasi-independent variable?
What is the alternative hypothesis in words?
What is the null hypothesis in words?

Run the appropriate statistical analysis in SPSS and highlight the relevant values on the output that should be used to answer the organization’s question.

Explain the findings in a manner that a senior leader could understand who does not have expertise in statistics (Hint: Explain the results without statistical language or notation).

Now describe these results to a scientific audience that does have expertise in statistics (i.e., in APA style).

Try your own scenario-based questions in a few homework assignments to examine if your students seem to grasp the content better when they know they will be asked to apply the information they learn in novel ways. After they are used to the structure of such questions, you can begin to ask them to come up with similar question types themselves and answer these as an additional homework question at the end of an assignment. This will give them the opportunity to produce creative applications of your course content that are inspired by the world they experience around them.

October 31, 2014October 30, 2014

What do we mean when we talk about scaffolding?

Scaffolding is a keyword that we are particularly fond of, because it is an essential part of our WAC pedagogy and seems to sometimes function as a cure-all. Students waiting until the last minute to write papers? Try scaffolding. Plagiarism problems? Scaffolding. Want to see polished final papers that have gone through multiple revisions? Scaffolding. You get the idea.

We’ve gone over this concept in detail in our workshops, and you can find lots of literature out there on the web that supports the effectiveness of this assignment design method. But what do we really mean when we talk about scaffolding? Is it just that we should break up a large paper into various kinds of smaller assignments that lead up to the “big one?”

One pitfall we can run into when designing a scaffolded assignment is that we will create a schedule for scaffolding a larger paper, but we might forget to elaborate on each of those steps. Unfortunately, simply breaking a paper up into smaller, cumulative tasks won’t necessarily improve our students’ writing.

Instead of just assigning that one big paper, we might create an assignment like:

(Week 3) Brainstorm paper topics in-class
(Week 4) Bring three possible topics to class, peer sharing in class
(Week 5) Choose a topic and create annotated bibliography
(Week 6) Rough Draft
(Week 7) In-class peer review
(Week 8) Final paper due

While this might be effective in making the paper-writing process seem less daunting and more manageable for students, they are still left with questions. What is “peer sharing?” What’s the point of an annotated bibliography (and more importantly, what does that even look like?). How do I choose my topic?

In particular, we’re asking the students to make a pretty big leap from having chosen a topic and some sources to suddenly writing a rough draft of a full paper without intervening steps. And we haven’t explained what these steps are along the way.

Students want to know why the tasks we’re setting them are meaningful. After all, doesn’t an annotated bibliography seem like busy work? Yet when we explain the usefulness of the annotations, the importance of understanding why we choose particular sources and how those will ultimately shape our paper’s point of view, it might start to be clear. When we explain that they will be forced to consider tough questions that may otherwise go overlooked, such as authority of the source, potential biases, place of publication, etc., the students will understand how this seemingly menial task is an important cog in the mechanics of research and paper writing.

Most importantly, we want to make sure the hallmarks of good assignment design—clarity, expectations, required steps, required formatting, and how students will be assessed—permeate all levels of our assignments. When we hand out that excellent cover page to a paper prompt, but then follow it with a one-line description of the scaffolded step, we undermine the very goal we’re trying to accomplish.

September 22, 2014September 19, 2014

Effective Assignment Design – Workshop Recap

This past Tuesday September 16^th, the WAC program presented a faculty workshop for effective assignment design led by myself and Roy Rogers. We had a wonderful turnout and some lively discussion about innovative assignment design approaches. Among the most helpful according to research in WAC pedagogy (see Bean, 2011 for a thorough description) are informal writing assignments, scaffolding, and typed assignment handouts. Please see our slides from this workshop HERE and our handout HERE.

Informal writing assignments are small, low-stakes (minimal points or ungraded) writing assignments that are often less structured than traditional formal assignments. Informal writing assignments are useful because they

provide a less anxiety-provoking route for discussing course content than formal assignments that are graded
allow students to grapple with difficult course-related concepts or topics
encourage creative idea generation and critical thinking
provide the ability for the instructor to check-in early with students to ensure they are on track
offer students an avenue to express confusion or questions related to the course content
ensure all students (even those that may be shy) participate and regularly engage with course material

Scaffolding is perhaps the MOST useful strategy for creating effective assignments. This refers to implementing multiple small, informal (or semi-formal) writing assignments that build up to a more formal high-stakes (graded and larger in nature) project in a course. They are beneficial because they

provide “levels” to your large assignments in that they allow for students to comprehend the information and practice the skills needed to do well before the big project/paper/lab report
allow students to build towards difficult larger assignments
offer instructors the ability to steadily assess student progress
support course learning objectives and make the goals and process transparent to students

Typed assignment handouts are most beneficial when they are provided to students both in class and on Blackboard or Openlab, are discussed briefly in class so students can raise questions if needed, and when they provide the expectations of the instructor regarding the assignment (even for informal assignments) in a clear manner. Typed assignment handouts are practical for both students and instructors because they

help students understand what they “need to do”
assist tutors in the Learning Center in providing appropriate assistance to students
provide a reference for instructors in later semesters, as it is easier to edit unclear wording, etc. for later courses when the assignment handout is readily available

Bean, J. C. (2011). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. 2^nd ed. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

September 15, 2014September 15, 2014

First workshop Tuesday, 9/16!

March 24, 2014

Why Using Samples?

Have you ever tried to solve a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the cover? I have. It’s frustrating, and I gave up after a very short time. And yet, I handed many of those ‘blind jigsaw puzzles’ to my students when I assigned a writing assignment without explaining what the final result should look like. To my defense, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s how I was taught to write, and it’s probably how must of us are, and were taught up until today. But when I started to progress from being an undergraduate student to I discovered how useful samples can be. Before writing my first grant application I gathered grant applications that have been successful. Before and while writing my first journal article I read many, many articles in the journal I wanted to submit the article to. I am not copying what has been written, but I am trying to get a sense of what the final result (the jigsaw puzzle) should look like to be successful.

For some reason, I have denied the same right to my students. I often expected them to come up with formal assignment that meets my expectations without ever explicitly showing them what those expectations are. Luckily, my students are vocal enough to let me know about their frustrations when trying to solve the puzzle. Their objections reminded me of my own frustrations when writing without knowing what’s expected, and I started to incorporate WAC principles, and my own experiences into my teaching.

Here is what I do:

I scaffold assignments, and assign many explorative writing assignments that lead up to a larger, more formal assignment. That helps students not to feel overwhelmed, and prevents the attempt to plagiarize.
All my assignments are handed out in writing, and as explicit as possible. I use Blackboard to post assignments, and I provide hard copies for students.
I always check in with students and ask if the assignment is clear (we do that during class time). If something is unclear, I make changes and ask my students to help me clarifying the assignment.
I do my best to provide samples for formal assignments. My formal assignments are often a combination of smaller, informal assignments. As a final step, I ask students to combine the smaller assignments they’ve done to a larger assignment.

Providing my students with samples of what that formal assignment should look like has produced very good results in my students’ writing, and they have found the experience to be much less frustrating.

March 6, 2014March 8, 2014

Tailoring Expectations

One useful perspective-realignment I’ve found useful raising to faculty, particularly those who don’t teach strictly “English,” is the that many assignments have implicit writing assumptions which must be made explicit. It is difficult sometimes to see the necessity of writing underlying even ostensibly non-“expressive,” or technical, assignments. This sounds like an easy, or superficial suggestion, but consider, for instance, courses which integrate design and writing in an integrative and mutually-informing manner — in order to produce any sort of finished, visually appealing document, the writing present within must be coherent and “finished;” yet, this expectation is often only alluded to tacitly. Further, even if one is actively grading “writing,” it is often difficult to break down this “writing” requirement into constitutive units the students can follow, or knowingly deal with on an individual, then total, basis. As an added benefit, when students are made more conscious about articulation, even in a small way regarding a tangible quality of writing, it makes them more aware of the total flow and logic of their work. (These tangible qualities are then able to compound, and inform one another.)

One possible suggestion: Perhaps (even as a sort of pedagogical thought experiment), try outlining one or two explicit qualities of writing to be graded, or paid attention to, in a non explicitly English or even humanities assignment. As we often discuss at WAC, try to scaffold, or otherwise anticipate the exact skill you would like them to exercise by introducing it earlier than the exact moment you wish them to recall or produce it. Then, see if, for example, should you ask them to pay attention to something like topic sentences, or even choosing neutral, or discipline-specific jargon for the assignment, whether the overall clarity of thought, and quality of product produced, improves.

This means of “tailoring” expectations, or honing in on required, but implicit, qualities of writing in assignments, is also transferable to other areas, such as peer review. Rather than asking students to holistically grade entire documents for “quality” or “followability,” try to hone in on two or three qualities (perhaps even breaking a “thesis” question down into a subcategory or two), and set firmly-defined timelines for how long students spend on each portion. This means of narrowing the scope of the students’ attention will likely improve the sharpness and nuance of the skills paid attention to, and overall improve the logic, thinking, and argument of the writing, and writing-reliant aptitudes, required.

December 18, 2013March 19, 2014

Writing to Learn

As the fall semester of 2013 draws to a close, it is useful to reflect on what we have accomplished over the course of the semester. We the Writing Across the Curriculum fellows have led three main faculty workshops since September: Effective Assignment Design, Peer Review, and Effective Grading. Despite the three varied topics of these workshops, they share a common thread, which is the WAC philosophy of “writing to learn,” and in addition, their content overlaps nicely.

In order to highlight WAC principles, I wish to focus on one particular aspect of the effective grading strategies that Jake Cohen and I discussed in our workshop on Tuesday, December 12 (the last of the semester). We went over some techniques to improve student writing and work, most of which also incidentally result in reduced grading time, which is always welcome, especially at this end-of-semester crunch grading time. To view our workshop slides, please click here, and check out the handout. (You can also visit this page to download documents from all of our workshops.) We discussed minimal marking, supportive responding when writing comments on student papers, rubrics, and planning assignments ahead of time to make grading more efficient. This last category is closely related to the two previous workshops from this semester: assignment design, clearly, and also peer review, in that having students assess each others’ work can save time, and greatly improve student writing.

This assignment design category is also the “one particular aspect” that I choose to elaborate on for this post. Among the several techniques we suggested for planning ahead to make assignments more “gradable,” one sticks out as being particularly WAC-esque: the uncollected writing assignment. The value of this notion, which is generally under-utilized by faculty in all departments, is two-fold: It is easy to see how uncollected assignments decrease the overall amount of time we spend grading work, of course, but why assign them at all? The answer lies in the foundation of WAC philosophy, which is that people learn by doing—and more specifically, by writing. So, what kind of uncollected writing do we recommend you assign, how do you enforce such assignments without collecting them, and, finally, how do students “learn by writing”?

One of the best illustrations of this concept is provided eloquently by Toby Fulwiler in “Why We Teach Writing in the First Place”: “Writing the thought on paper objectifie[s] the thought in the world… [which] even happens when I write out a grocery list—when I write down ‘eggs’ I quickly see that I also need ‘bacon.’ And so on” (127). This concept works well for professors across the curricula: Think about assigning a five-minute, in-class free-write asking students to describe course content covered in the past month/week/hour, by way of ensuring that they can articulate it well for whatever type of exam they have coming up, and by way of allowing them to discover holes in their understanding of what you have covered so far. If you are concerned that they won’t oblige the assignment without the potential for reward, then you can choose, for example, to select three at random to read aloud in class, or to be posted on your Blackboard/OpenLab page that same evening.

We hope that those who incorporate this technique will ultimately find that the grading process of the final papers you assign will be ameliorated, in that the students have now had a chance to “practice” or “train” for the final writing process, something akin to athletes who could never run a marathon without similar training, without you having been required to grade an intermediary draft. Ideally, as students come across “holes” in their own comprehension of your course content, they may come to you with more questions, or make better use of your office hours. I know that they will arrive at a deeper understanding of your course material in the same way that I have done regarding WAC philosophy, in the process of writing out this blog post.

Happy Holidays!

November 10, 2013

Quick Fixes That Can Help Improve Student Writing

Ideally, we want to introduce students slowly to the process of creating formal research papers. A research paper – or any formal paper for that matter – is a complex task that assumes a wealth of knowledge on the side of the student. What is an appropriate source? How to use evidence? Who is the intended audience the voice of the paper should be directed at? How to organize one’s thoughts? What is considered an appropriate thesis? All these, and many more, are questions students have to have tackled before they will be able to write a successful paper. It is because of the complexity that is inherent in each formal assignment that we will see better results when we break down assignments into smaller, doable tasks. Scaffolded assignments that break down larger formal assignments into small tasks help students to focus, and understand the smaller pieces a research paper is made of.

But what happens when we cannot scaffold an assignment to help students to write more successfully? Sometimes the constraints of the course curriculum do not allow us to break down assignments, sometimes we inherit a course, and do not have the time to make substantial changes to the course’s assignments, or we assign a paper that we think is doable to students only to find out later that we asked too much of our students. There are a few things we can do to help students write more successfully, to be more engaged in the process of writing, and to get more consistent results throughout:

Take 20 minutes of your class time to go over the assignment with your students. Many of the questions students deal with when writing a paper can be solved by a Q & A session in which students have the possibility to learn about their professor’s expectations. I find an in-class discussion much more fruitful than an email or office hour conversation with single students, as students will learn from each other while talking about the assignment. Some of the questions students have may be questions others would not have thought about, or were reluctant to ask. By going over the assignment together students will teach each other a valuable lesson on how to approach the writing of a research paper.

Be open to revisions. You may know this already but professors, too, can be terribly unclear and implicit. It is difficult to put yourself into the mind of an undergraduate student who is asked to perform the required task for the first time. We can learn from our students how to write clearer assignments by asking them to explain what parts of the assignment they find confusing, or unintelligible. I found students to be more engaged, and motivated about an assignment when I took into consideration their suggestions and revised the assignment I had given them. Apart from making the assignment clearer, and therefore more doable for my students they would learn another important lesson:

Ask your students to revise their own assignments before submitting them. Revision is one of the most essential parts of the writing process. It organizes the writer’s own thoughts, it turns a wild first draft into a piece that is comprehensible to others, it detects grammar and spelling errors, typos, and missing words. The practice of revision is at the very heart of the academic tradition. And yet, we fail to engrain the process of revision into our student teaching all too often. More than once did I expect my students to come up with a well-organized, error free, and thoughtful first draft. Boy, am I glad they never saw one of my first drafts. Ideally, we would want to assist our students’ efforts to develop a strong final draft by scaffolding the assignment and/ or have them submit multiple drafts that they then can revise (by peer reviewing each other for instance). But even if students have only one opportunity to submit their assignment they should take time to revise it; and since students are beginner writers they need instructions on how to do it. A good technique that is easy to perform is to read aloud the first draft. Ideally, students should find a listener who can give feedback. But even without somebody else present reading aloud will help to detect errors. This is a particularly good exercise for students whose first language is not English, and who might find it easier to hear mistakes rather than reading them. The instructions on how to revise their essays should be part of the assignment sheet, and talked about in class. If class time permits, instructors may also want students to bring in their assignments, read them to each other in class, take notes, and revise them later at home based on the assignment’s instruction, and possibly grading rubrics. Which brings me to my next point:

If you use grading rubrics, give them to your students along with the assignment. It is much easier for students to perform a good job when they know what is expected of them. Personally, I use “checklists” that tell students what is expected of them in each part of the assignment (introduction, methods, and results section) instead of traditional grading rubrics. Again, students are at a beginner stage when it comes to producing written work that is research based, and they benefit tremendously from clear guidelines that lay out what is expected of them.

A final option to consider, particularly when your discipline requires students to write similar assignments, such as lab reports, multiple times, is to focus only on one aspect of the assignment rather than the entire assignment. In some cases scaffolded assignments may not seem feasible, and students are required to produce complete assignments all at once. In that case, you may want to consider focusing only on one aspect of the assignment per cycle. Let’s say your students have to submit 12 lab reports in your course each semester. You can have them write 12 reports, but in your grading feedback focus on one aspect for each lab report. By focusing on only parts of the assignments (such as the introduction, the formatting, results section, and so on) students will think more deeply about the requirements, and complexities of each section, and you, on the other hand, can pay more attention to the details of each section in your feedback. At the end of the course, students will be able to write an entire paper more easily, and with more consistent results.

These are only a few of many “quick fixes” that can be used when assigning papers to students, and that will help students to become better writers, and scholars. The fixes offered are largely based on the principles of Writing Across the Curriculum, as well as personal teaching experience at various CUNY campuses.

Tag: assignment design