GenAI and Student Writing: Additional Considerations for Multilingual Writers

Generative AI has created some challenging new realities for instructors. While initial concerns focused on academic integrity and the risks of GenAI being used as a replacement for student work, emerging concerns are developing around the ways students may be differently impacted by these advances. Last fall, Indiana University was subject to media scrutiny and a lawsuit after its AI detection technology, Turnitin.com, systematically produced false positive results for work submitted by multilingual students.

Summative Feedback: Focusing on Learning and Grading

Research in teaching with writing consistently emphasizes the importance of early, formative feedback on writing as critical for students' growth as writers. Formative comments on works in progress can affirm effective writing choices, correct misconceptions and misunderstandings, and coach students on various improvements they can make to their written work. The labor of revising and extending their writing based on expert feedback provides some of the most engaging and practical lessons for developing writers.

Collaborative Writing: Lessons from Multi-Authored Scientific Research

Among the many reasons to assign collaborative or team-based writing to students is that it models the collaborative and team-oriented academic fields and workplace contexts where they hope to work. Three Minnesota researchers in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and colleagues from four other institutions recently described work in their discipline to promote meaningful authorship in massively multi-authored scientific papers.

Ready, Set, Comment

The final weeks of the semester can be a period of frenzied production as students prepare drafts of their final projects—proposals, essays, presentations, etc.—with hopes of receiving guidance from their instructors and teaching assistants before turning in final versions. While intentionally scaffolded assignments can do much to support students through the process of completing a final project, they do not alleviate the need for timely feedback.

Designing and Assessing Reflective Writing Assignments

Many instructors know the benefits of reflective writing for promoting students’ conceptual understanding, encouraging student agency, and helping students transfer what they have learned to new contexts. At the same time, grading students' reflections can be challenging: when students report their personal, subjective reflections, doesn’t it make all grading subjective? How can we grade reflective work fairly?

Rubrics 2.0: Descriptive Criteria Enable Student Success

Faculty and instructors tend to be divided over the use of rubrics and scoring sheets to assess writing. Some instructors appreciate the sense of consistency that rubrics provide and how they simplify grading. Others find scoring rubrics artificial and confining, and worry that splitting hairs between categories increases assessment challenges. In this blog post, we’ll look at the question of scoring rubrics from the perspective of student performance and recent research on how scoring rubrics can help students learn.

Is Grammar Correction Worth the Effort? Strategies for Written Corrective Feedback

Sentence-level errors can be a frustrating component of working with student writing. Each instance of a sentence-level error breaks the flow of reading and can lend an impression of carelessness or inattention. Faculty members, many of whom are accomplished writers, can spend hours correcting minor errors in student writing, which distracts from the learning goals of the assignment.