The Writing Across the Curriculum program offers many resources on peer response as an effective strategy for improving student writing. Students become more effective readers and writers when they can engage each other with formative feedback. At the same time, instructors may be challenged to find time to assign and implement peer response activities in their courses, especially if those courses have large enrollments.
The Teaching with Writing Blog uses categories to describe the contents of previous entries to assist readers in finding timely and appropriate resources. In this March Blog Post, we’ll reissue some of the most popular and cited posts on working with sources.
The arrival of ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through popular media and higher education circles. Headlines have suggested that artificial intelligence could render some familiar genres and technologies obsolete (including the college essay and Google).
While students in nearly every upper-division course will be asked to analyze and synthesize information, the meaning of these terms changes with instructional contexts. They may analyze scholarly arguments to make an assertion about the state of knowledge or create a new research question. Students may also analyze results from experimental tests to draw accurate conclusions from measurement, while in another course, they may be tasked with analyzing multiple policies or practices and then designing their own.
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.
By Joe Moses
Now is an opportune time to work on your course syllabus. As you do so, we invite you to consult with a colleague in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program.
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?
Posted by Daniel Emery // // 0