If that’s what you’re doing, it’s consistent with the actions of faculty teaching undergraduate sociology courses; as documented by an analysis of 405 different syllabi. Almost 95% of those syllabi described some type of writing assignment and most of them required more than one.

Researchers found that faculty employed a variety of writing assignments in their courses; 49% included essay exam writing (including take-home tests), 48% required short reflection papers such as book reports, group project reports or essays, 23% assigned 6-10 page papers, 14% traditional library-research papers, 12% used some sort of journal assignments, 11% assigned longer 11-15 page papers, and 2% used creative writing assignments. Another 17.5% used assignments that belonged in an “other” category, which included things like written homework, outlines, writing for the web, case studies, memos, and study guide questions.

Course syllabi that listed critical thinking as a course goal were significantly more likely to include writing assignments that the researchers labeled “transactional” — in that they informed, instructed, or persuaded readers. An author referenced in the article suggests that writing assignments that develop critical thinking skills should contain these components: “They must ask questions, define problems clearly, examine evidence, analyze assumptions and biases, avoid emotional reasoning, avoid oversimplification, consider alternative interpretations, and tolerate uncertainty.” (p. 48)

Even though students taking these courses wrote more and completed more kinds of writing assignments than their peers in other courses, they were assigned traditional term papers infrequently. Most of the courses were not introductory-level courses, but courses taken by majors. Why have teachers abandoned the venerable term-paper assignment? Are students so unable to write coherent, well-developed research analyses that teachers have given up on the assignment? What skills do term-paper assignments develop? Are those skills necessary for the writing tasks most professionals face?

In this sample, almost 81% of the writing assignments were transactional. A bit more than 63% were expressive assignments — identified as reflective writing in which students typically explore feelings and individual reactions. Expressive writing is often less formal, may be done during class, and is graded less on grammatical and syntactical correctness. Less than 1% of the writing assignments described on these syllabi involved what the researchers call “poetic” or creative writing.

Are students in sociology being asked to write enough and to do the kind of writing that develops the skills sociology graduates need? Those are questions only those in sociology can answer, but they are questions that should be asked of the collection of writing experiences in every major.

I know I written this before, but we so regularly do not think about collections of learning experiences (like writing assignments) that occur across a set of courses or in degree program. If those teaching in a program shared their syllabi, this kind of analysis could easily be replicated and the results would raise questions we ought to be discussing. Questions like:

• How much writing is enough, given the skills student don’t have and need to acquire?
• Are some writing assignments better suited for some courses?
• What writing assignments are best suited for introductory courses, major courses, and capstone experiences?
• Besides developing writing skills, are these assignments contributing to the development of other course and program goals?
• Do our writing assignments prepare students for the kinds of writing they will be doing professionally?

Writing does serve different purposes in different fields, so what’s being done in sociology isn’t a benchmark for all fields. But it should motivate us to consider our writing assignments. Are the writing experiences offered to students accomplishing the goals that have been set for those assignments? It’s a question to ask about writing assignments in individual courses as well as across the entire degree program.

Reference: Grauerholz, L., Eisele, J., and Stark, N. (2012). Writing in the sociology curriculum: What types and how much writing do we assign? Teaching Sociology, 41 (1), 46-59.

As usual, my reading is what got me thinking about this topic. In this case it’s a new book by Paul Hanstedt on general education. He recommends that assignments for general education courses should achieve at least three things: 1) contain evidence that students are learning what we want them to be learning, 2) engage students in deep, long lasting learning, and 3) generate student work that doesn’t make us cry when we grade them. (p. 78)

It’s the example of his general education writing course focused on the social functions of art that made me see how clear the connection between assignments and course goals needs to be. He has four goals for his course. Students should be able to: 1) write an effective essay using appropriate rhetorical methods given the audience and purpose, 2) interpret individual responses to art, 3) apply abstract concepts about art to particular works, and 4) analyze the role art plays in contemporary life (p. 83). To accomplish those goals he used to have students write three papers; one that analyzed a representational piece of art, pre-1850, a second that analyzed an abstract piece of art, post-1850; and a third that explored the role art should play in society. Okay assignments, but they didn’t produce work that showed students achieving the course goals all that well.

After making some changes, students are still writing three papers, but the assignments are very different. Now in the first paper, students analyze a piece of art that they like using the formal elements to explain their emotional response to it. They write this paper to a classmate as a way of introducing themselves. In the second paper, they use a quotation from the readings to justify the necessity of abstract art in contemporary society. They write this paper to a skeptical parent. For the third paper, students construct an argument justifying the use of university funds for the purchase of art, explaining the role they think art should play in academia. This final paper is addressed to the university president.

Here’s why these assignments better accomplish the course goals. Designating an audience for each paper forces students to assume authority for their knowledge and take on the task of explaining relevant concept and ideas to others. They aren’t writing so directly to and for the professor as when the audience wasn’t designated. The fact that the audience changes with every paper mirrors what happens in professional life. Professionals must deal with multiple audiences, customizing their message accordingly. Students also need to do research to write these kinds of papers, particularly the third one. And these papers do a much better job of showing the degree to which students understand and can apply course concepts. Finally, they give students the opportunity to make choices that are more personally relevant.

Does that mean students enjoy writing these papers? That’s probably a stretch, but there is a greater chance students might get engaged in the topics. And Hanstedt says these papers are definitely more interesting to read.

Right now you probably need to finish up that stack of whatever you’re grading, but as you do you might think a bit about your course goals. Is this particular assignment helping students accomplish them? Are there ways you could change the design that might align it more tightly to course goals? There’s great opportunity for creativity and innovation in the design of assignments and more faculty are taking advantage of that. I’d love to see a collection of interesting assignments and the goals they’re being used to accomplish in the comment section. Please share a brief description or a link where we can read about what you’re having students do.

Reference: Hanstedt, P. General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012.

This semester I required all of the students to write about our city, Anderson, Indiana. In addition to all of the other “process” assignments I use to teach my students inquiry, research strategies and drafting techniques, I recently added an art project to the mix. The assignment was simple: create a poster that gives a “face” to the city of Anderson. I told the students to be creative in their design and to represent visually the key discoveries they’ve made about their specialized topics. I also encouraged them to suggest the focus and purpose for their essay through the content or design of the poster. I promised to give each student 30 seconds to offer comments about his or her poster to the class.

In “Design Principles for Visual Communication,” Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li and Floraine Berthouzoz insist that communication through visual images is “fundamental to the process of exploring concepts and disseminating information.” Because I teach writing, I tend to be preoccupied primarily with discovery and communication through language. However, the liberal arts academy in which I teach reminds me that the relationship between the humanities, the sciences and the arts is intimate and profound. “The most effective visualizations capitalize on the human facility for processing visual information, thereby improving comprehension, memory, and inference” (Agrawala, Li and Floraine 60). That’s exactly what I was trying to accomplish with my students: capitalize on their ability to “comprehend” their own discoveries and to communicate those discoveries and rhetorical ambitions to an audience clearly.

The posters students created in response to the assignment were impressive—not in their artistic design but in their clarity. Nearly every student was able to articulate an appropriately narrow focus AND a specific purpose for the essay project. Making the poster seemed to help them identify the key ideas or categories of information they would include in the paper.

Using words, symbols, clip art, photographs and drawings (some very crude, some skillful), the students successfully identified relationships among the bodies of information or ideas they had generated through research and exploratory writing. Many of the students even reflected on their research process in their comments about the poster, using phrases like “I thought X was true about Anderson, but I discovered . . .” or “I think readers would be surprised to learn X about this city . . .” or “My goal for the essay is to persuade readers that . . .” Although I gave specific instructions for the poster, I gave no specific instructions for the commentary. The students’ statements suggested to me that the act of translating ideas and information into a visual “essay” helped them take control of their own writing goals.

For the next essay, I plan to use this poster technique in lieu of a traditional outline. Organizing content visually and symbolically may be just the trick to helping student “comprehend” a logical structure for their arguments.

Reference: Agrawala, Maneesh, Wilmot Li and Floraine Berthouzoz. “Design Principles for Visual Communication.” Communications of the ACM 54.4 (2011): 60-69. Academic Search
Premier. Web. 3 Oct. 2012.

Deborah Miller Fox is professor of composition, creative writing and literature at Anderson University, a liberal arts college in central Indiana.

Asking students to list questions raised by the course is such an interesting idea. How do you think students would respond? I’m thinking most would be confused—“what do you want us to do?” “Questions about what?”

I was rereading an article this morning that offers an interesting way to prepare students to think about questions posed by the course. Victoria Costa writes about teaching introductory biology and chemistry courses to nonscience majors and beginning the courses with what she calls a course question: “How does chemistry (or biology, depending on the course) impact my personal life and society?” This question forms the basis of the course final, provides the framework within which students pose for themselves a “personal perplexity” or question of particular interest to them. In their final, an essay, they explain this question’s relevance to them and society, and they use course content to explore the question’s answer.

They work on two other assignments related to the course question. In groups of three, students evaluate a current newspaper or magazine article, a movie, TV program, book [it could be a website or something else online] in terms of the course question. They prepare a written response and make an oral presentation. Finally, students complete a class project that explores how chemistry or biology impacts their career or personal lives. The article includes descriptions of several of these projects. I like the idea of a course question, but a unit question or even a question for the day—one that opens the class and is then revisited at the end of the period—could be used to illustrate the importance and intrique of questions.

We really must look for ways of getting students more question-oriented starting with the questions they currently ask. So much of what they ask focuses on course details—“how many pages do you want?” “when is the next test?” “does spelling count?” A lot of these kinds of questions are answered in the syllabus but beyond that, these queries reduce questioning to such a banal level in the class. I know, students want to be sure they’ve got the details right, but not only is the ability to ask questions a skill that merits developing, good questions are what make our material fascinating.

In the upcoming February issue of The Teaching Professor, Eli Merchant writes eloquently about what questions can accomplish. I love this quote. “Good questions are treasure troves … because they so effectively open new vistas, provide new perspectives, and challenge our most basic assumptions. Good questions are those which the questioner cannot answer. They are used to initiate a dialogue where answers, even short and partial ones, begin to crystallize and shape themselves, provoking still other questions and answers, like waves rippling onto waves, interminably.”

Reference: Costa, V. “The Use of a Course Question to Facilitate Student Learning: How Does Chemistry Impact My Personal Life and Society?” Journal of College Science Teaching, 1993, (September/October), 49-53.

However, the products of these last-minute efforts suffered. Students were unsatisfied with their grades, and reading these hastily prepared papers was painful for me. Even worse, when I returned this work, students flipped to the final score on the paper and never bothered with my comments. Buried in the final frantic weeks of the semester, amid other assignments and final exams, the learning potential of this experience was largely lost.

Good writing is a valuable skill that students can take from college, and we work to develop it in our curriculum. Our majors read several texts that provide insights on scientific writing. We spend considerable class time discussing the construction of a scientific paper. However, student writing doesn’t improve with talking; students need to practice both writing and revising. The way to ensure that students revise is to make revision a required part of the project.

In response, I adopted a new strategy. During the final month of classes, some facet of the project is due every period. I have deadlines for the methods section (which is submitted first in list form), a properly formatted annotated bibliography, a hierarchical outline for the introduction, the paragraphed methods section, a rough draft version of the introduction, an outline of the discussion section, rough results that include graphs and tables, a complete rough draft, and the final paper.

This may seem like a daunting grading task during the already hectic last month of the semester. As it turns out, I do not grade each draft. I start with a checklist indicating each item due from the student. I check them off as they are handed in. No late drafts are allowed for any item. I write brief comments. For poorer drafts, the comments are fewer but broader in scope. For example, I do not comment on specific wording or structure when the whole section requires major revision.

I periodically ask the students to meet with me so that I can interpret my comments (this is easily accomplished during a laboratory meeting). My comments on early drafts focus on framing their work in a broader context. Comments on later drafts focus on more detailed facets of their wording or ideas. The main goal is to get students to revise their work.

Because I do not grade each draft, the students need to be motivated to do serious revision. To encourage students to pay attention to my comments and revise appropriately, their final project is due as a portfolio, with all of the drafts appended to the final product. As I mark the final paper, I can see whether I have already made a recommendation and whether students have acted on it. Their response to early criticism constitutes 15 percent of the final project grade.

Despite initial misgivings, student response to this approach has been overwhelmingly positive. They appreciate having the opportunity to improve their work on a project that constitutes a large portion of their course grade.

Their papers have dramatically improved. Students appear to learn more about the writing process as they are forced to rectify shortcomings in earlier drafts of their work. Stress levels seem lower. Their final week is spent in assembly and revision rather than literature review and draft-writing. Given the quality of their papers, I’m convinced their better writing is worth the effort.

Kari Benson, PhD is an associate professor of biology and environmental science at Lynchburg College.

Excerpted from “Avoiding the Blank Screen Blues.” The Teaching Professor, 24.9 (2010): 3.

Professor Collier is frustrated. He has been teaching language arts for well over two decades. He is thoroughly convinced of the importance of developing good writing skills and spends countless hours poring over student submissions, making numerous editorial comments in an effort to encourage them to develop as writers. Sadly, he finds that many of the students he teaches focus only on the final grade and express little interest in revising their work.

Does this scenario sound familiar? We work hard as teachers to provide constructive feedback, only to find it ignored or resented. Problems in student writing persist and sometimes even worsen, while both students and faculty members grow increasingly frustrated.

Teachers who wish to provide meaningful feedback to which students will actually attend need to focus on two key components:

1. The content of the verbal feedback. The content of the feedback should communicate the messages that the teacher cares about the student, that the student is capable of being successful as a writer, and that the teacher is willing to help map a path the student may follow to that success.
2. The nature of the vehicle(s) used to deliver the feedback. In the modern era student writing is often submitted digitally, and feedback may be delivered in the same way. In considering which digital tools are appropriate, it is helpful to distinguish among three different types of errors, with their corresponding feedback.

Providing feedback on mechanic errors
There are generally three headings under which written errors will fall. The first of these is mechanical errors. Mechanical errors include misspelled words (or misused homonyms that have been spelled correctly and thus not caught by a spell-checker), grammatical errors (e.g., subject/verb agreement), and punctuation errors.

Though attending to mechanical corrections is certainly important, they may be the category of errors least likely to be consistently and painstakingly addressed as students revise. From the perspective of the teacher/editor, errors of this type are usually noted without the use of lengthy commentary. A word processing “track changes” feature appears best suited for this type of error (particularly if the file is sent back to the student in PDF format to obviate students’ simply accepting a teacher’s corrections without reviewing them).

Providing feedback on micro-level content errors
A second category of written errors refers to the structure of ideas within a particular paragraph. We term this category micro-level content errors. Such errors require active rewriting on the student’s part, based on constructive comments from the teacher. This requires lengthier feedback than for mechanical errors, and such feedback appears best presented using a word processing “insert comments” feature.

Providing feedback on macro-level content errors
The third and final category of written errors includes problems that detract from the manuscript as a whole. We term these errors macro-level content errors. Examples include faulty document structure and erroneous reasoning. These errors also require active rewriting based on teacher feedback, but in addition may require that the writer think about the document as a whole and possibly reorganize or rewrite multiple sections simultaneously.

Feedback provided in this category is at once both the most complex feedback an instructor/editor may provide and the most difficult for the student to apply constructively. Digitized audio feedback appears to be the preferred method for providing this type of commentary; fortunately, it can be created using commonly available tools and attached to a student’s digitized document file.

An initial trial in this context found that students who received digitized audio feedback expressed higher perceptions of competence, intrinsic motivation, and autonomy, and experienced an improvement in overall writing abilities, compared with those students who received more conventional feedback (Harper, 2009).

Effective feedback need not necessarily be overly critical, complex, or lengthy, but should instead equip students with the means by which they may take responsibility for their learning. By considering not only what they will say but how they should say it, teachers can assure that their efforts to promote the development of students’ writing skills will not be in vain.

Reference
Harper, B. (2009). “I’ve never seen or heard it this way!”: Increasing student engagement through the use of technology-enhanced feedback. Teaching Educational Psychology, 5 (1).

Brian Harper is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Cleveland State University. William Beasley is a professor and chair in the same department.

Excerpted from “Does It Matter How We Give Our Students Constructive Feedback in a Technology-Mediated Environment?” Online Classroom (Nov. 2009): 1-2.

Students often react first to the number of comments on the paper. They look to see how much the instructor “bled” on their papers. They may not even read overall comments that appear at the end. Sometimes it helps to put those comments up front so that students see them first.

Notes in the margins of the papers tend to be sketchy. With little room in the margins, instructors use more underlining, coding, and abbreviating. Many marginal notes simply label a problem without further explanation or example. For instance, I have written, “There are stronger works for your POV” on papers not thinking that POV (for point of view) may be an unfamiliar acronym. Not only does this feedback puzzle and frustrate students, it doesn’t help them improve.

There is a difference between an explanation that simply shows the students how to reword or rewrite something and an in-depth explanation that discusses the reasoning behind the suggested change. For example, in a legal brief for my Business Law class, a student wrote, “This is an appeal from the judgment of the St. Joseph County Superior Court, by a jury, that the defendant was guilty of check forgery.” After having spent so much time on the papers that my hand ached, I gave into writer’s cramp and simply underlined “the judgment” and “by the jury.” Fortunately, the student came to me and asked what I meant.

On one of my first papers (when my hand was fresh and cramp free), I wrote, “Watch your language. A jury convicts or acquits but cannot render a judgment. The court enters a judgment on the jury’s verdict.” This comment is a more useful explanation.

Instructors must balance the positive and negative comments, remembering the importance of positive feedback. It motivates students, is essential to improvement, and builds confidence. If students are told why something is good, they can do more of it subsequently. Papers lacking any positive feedback tend to lead to poor student morale.

Closely related is the overall tone of the comments. Instructors need to keep the tone professional. Constructive criticism goes a long way, but destructive criticism goes an even longer way. Once someone destroys your self-confidence as a writer, it is almost impossible to write well.

How many is too many? Instructors should monitor the number of comments they write on students’ papers. Although it may be tempting to comment on everything, the workload quickly becomes intolerable and too much feedback may overwhelm the students. They find it difficult to prioritize the comments and tend to retreat into simple and safe writing in an effort to avoid another barrage of comments. Or they don’t even read the comments and therefore learn nothing from the feedback. However, the major problem with the overcommented paper is that the instructor has lost both a sense of focus and a point of view.

The solution is to separate the mechanical comments and the substantive comments. The mechanical comments encourage the student to see the paper as a fixed piece that just needs some editing. The substantive comments, however, suggest that the student still needs to develop the meaning by doing more research.

When commenting on students’ papers, think of your audience and your purpose. Your job as an instructor is to reach your students to help them learn and grow. If your comments do not accomplish your goal, then it doesn’t matter how much time and effort you put into the papers.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, Volume 23, Number 8.

Most faculty don’t encourage students to use personal experience because it is seen as too subjective and without much intellectual substance. Mott has students in her political theory course write three personal essays. Her motivation derives partly from the need to “displace the preponderance of passivity I find in their essays.” (p. 207) Not only does the academy object to the personal, but students themselves have been trained to stay out of their writing. “High school students know from experience that the more they talk about themselves, the more will be taken away.” (p. 207)

Mott’s carefully designed writing assignments creatively weave the first-person voice and personal experience into explorations of the political theorists being read in the course. Here’s her second five-page essay assignment:

“Begin by describing a situation in which you felt at odds with a professional (a doctor, a lawyer, a therapist, a teacher, a social worker). Show us (don’t tell us) how your experience of the event differed from that of the professional. Let the details of the story convey all the confusions of this experience. Stop and breathe. In the subsequent section, use one or two passages from Montaigne to analyze this experience, to unpack the confusion, and to lay out the terms of power. Finally, what did you learn about yourself as a result of this essay? (p. 209)

“The beauty of this method is that it allows a layering of experience, first descriptive, and then analytical, so that the writer becomes both participant and judge. First the writer explores the fullness of experience and then she reflects back on it using theory.” (p. 209) All three of Mott’s essay assignments are designed so that students cannot write about just their feelings or personal experiences. The personal writing becomes a vehicle for substantive discussion of course content. The article contains excerpts from student essays, and these show how effectively this approach enables students to confront personal experience with political theories that can explain more deeply or challenge what they may have come to believe about those experiences.

This article is not particularly easy reading, as Mott describes the writing assignments in terms of very specific discipline-based content. What the article does show clearly is how powerful carefully designed writing explorations like these can be. They allow students to take what they know and what they have experienced and hold that knowledge against a light that significantly illuminates their understanding.

Reference: Mott, M. (2008). Passing our lives through the fire of thought: The personal essay in the political theory classroom. PS, Political Science and Politics, 41 (1), 207-211.

Excerpted from Use Personal Essay Assignments to Encourage Substantive Discussion of Course Content, The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 3.

The Weaver study (reference below) surveyed business and design students, seeking answers to four questions: Do students understand the feedback? What are their perceptions of the feedback? What kind of comments do they find helpful versus not helpful? And how can the value of the feedback provided be increased? The Smith study (reference below) surveyed business students in their junior year and was motivated by similar questions, such as what types of comments students find most useful in improving their writing and what form those comments should take. (p. 325)

Students in both studies reported that they did read written comments. In the Smith study, an average of 4.73 (out of 5.0) was generated in response to the statement “I read the comments that my professor makes in the body of my paper.” A 1.54 mean (with 1 being “strongly disagree”) resulted in response to the statement “I just look at the paper’s grade, not the comments.”

Both studies contain useful details. For example, in the Weaver study, students were asked to respond to a series of words and phrases commonly written on papers and then indicate how confident they were that they understood what the instructor meant. Here are a few examples: “Logical and coherent structure”: 42 percent were very confident they understood what that meant and 58 percent were fairly confident; “Lacks application of theory”: 50 percent were very confident and 29 percent fairly confident; and “Superficial analysis”: only 5 percent were very confident and 54 percent fairly confident. In this last case, don’t forget about the group of more than 40 percent who said they did not understand what the comment meant.

Smith gave students examples of different grading methods, and then asked them to identify their preferences and, in response to an open query, say why they preferred the one picked. Method 1 used a matrix or rubric that identified several different areas, assigned points to each, and included some brief comments. Method 2 offered a paragraph that identified the problems with the paper. Method 3 also offered feedback in a paragraph, but in this case, three positive features of the essay were identified, and then the same problems were discussed. Sixty percent of the respondents preferred the Method 1 rubric, with the Method 3 paragraph being second favorite, preferred by 36.4 percent of the students.

Both studies also contained clear indications of what compromises the effectiveness of comments on papers. Students in the two studies wanted both positive and negative feedback. For example, on the Smith survey, “I want to know what I did correctly on my papers, not just what I did wrong” generated a mean response of 4.49 (out of 5.0).

Weaver’s study also included a qualitative component in which students were asked to bring samples of papers with commentary to a group discussion to talk about the comments. Out of the discussions emerged four characteristics of comments that students did not find helpful when they tried to improve their writing on subsequent papers. First were comments identified as being too general or too vague, such as “A sound answer, generally” or “You’ve got the important stuff right.” One is tempted to point out that if students wrote comments like those, most teachers would ask them to be more explicit. Second, students found it difficult to improve when the commentary provided no guidance. They wanted to know specifically and concretely what they needed to do better on the next paper. Laudatory comments on one paper included a list of the four things the student most needed to work on in the next paper.

Reaffirming what was found in other data were objections to commentary that focused entirely on the negative. An analysis of the comments revealed that negative feedback tended to be more specific than positive feedback. When offered, positive comments tended to be vague, such as the word “good” scrawled down the side of a paper.

Some students do ignore instructor feedback, whether it’s written comments on papers or face-to-face feedback, but maybe not as many as instructors are inclined to think. Perhaps that number could be reduced further still if instructors attended to this feedback on their own feedback.

References:
Smith, L. J. (2008). Grading written projects: What approaches do students find most helpful? Journal of Education for Business, July/August 2008, 325-330.

Weaver, M. R. (2006). Do students value feedback? Student perceptions of tutors’ written responses. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31 (3), 379-394.

Excerpted from Written Feedback: What’s Most and Least Helpful, The Teaching Professor, February 2009.

Peer review has been a standard collaborative strategy in English for decades. The activity strengthens students’ editing skills, helps develop confidence in their own writing, and creates a sense of community among writers. With proper guidance students can give each other valuable advice on works in progress and come to rely on that extra set of eyes looking over their work. But building student trust in peer response takes time. Because students see the teacher as the most important source of knowledge as well as the person in charge of grades, they find it difficult to trust peer opinions. I have developed an assignment that hastens this trust building process as it shows students the value of collaboration, with the added bonus of establishing a sense of community in the class.

Although any text could be used for a collaborative assignment of this nature, I use Carol Dweck’s Mindsets: The New Psychology of Success because the content of the book reinforces many of the learning outcomes of the course. This book, a popularized version of Dweck’s psychological research on individuals’ attitudes toward failure and challenge, defines two types of mindsets, growth and fixed. People with a growth mindset accept failure as a challenge and a means to improve. Growth-mindset people believe that intelligence is expandable. Fixed-mindset individuals consider intelligence static and unchangeable and, therefore, see failure as a threat to identity. Fixed-mindset people are less likely to take risks for fear of appearing inadequate. The book, which is full of personal examples of famous people who demonstrate the two mindsets, provides a rich discussion platform for establishing attitudes about learning. It could be used in many different kinds of courses, such as first-year seminars or senior capstone courses.

The simplicity of the writing task makes this assignment easily adapted to many other non-composition courses. After reading the book, each student prepares and brings to class two paragraphs, one describing a person he or she knows who illustrates the fixed mindset and one describing a person who illustrates the growth mindset. We look at the paragraphs as a class and talk about their accuracy in relation to Dweck’s definitions. I then put the students in teams of four. Their assignment is to take the eight paragraphs that they have as a group and use them as the basis of an essay defining the two mindsets. They must include paragraphs from each group member, but the goal is to create an essay with a single voice, not a Frankenstein piece that sounds like four different people’s work sewn together. Their ability to work through the process and to substantially revise the original pieces is weighted heavily on the assessment rubric for the assignment.

For the composition class, this assignment provides an interesting rhetorical problem. Although the essay is easy in the sense that the body paragraphs have been created and the organization and content are fairly simple, the assignment poses significant challenges in relation to point of view and voice. The entire exercise is focused on writing as revision, another key learning outcome of the course.

Promoting positive attitudes toward learning
But as important for me is the effectiveness of this assignment in fostering community and promoting positive attitudes toward learning. In regard to community, the students exchange email addresses and phone numbers, share drafts via email, and meet outside of class in order to complete the project. Through this assignment, they develop acquaintances who frequently become study partners with whom they feel comfortable sharing work throughout the semester. This group experience makes students much less self-conscious about making mistakes, and they begin to ask each other for help and advice.

Too often students believe that their intelligence has been determined and that school is just a matter of validating whether they are smart or not. By looking for the mindsets in their friends and family, they begin to consider their own attitudes as well. They know from reading Dweck that although one might have a natural propensity for one mindset, mindsets can be changed. The students begin to understand that rather than viewing mistakes as validation of one’s inadequacy, they can use them to identify areas for growth and improvement. With the help of others, they can successfully address these challenges.

Students generally perform well on this assignment. The positive feedback they receive bolsters their sense of accomplishment and their belief in the value of collaboration and peer review. Long after we have moved beyond this assignment, we continue to make reference to fixed and growth mindsets as well as other learning-related concepts from the work. Dweck’s book sets the stage for learning and provides a valuable starting point for any course that intentionally focuses on student learning.

Dr. Roxanne Cullen is a professor at Ferris State University, Michigan.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, April 2008.

There’s a reason that the Wikipedia entry normally comes in at the top of a Google search. Google relies heavily on inbound links to rank a site, and Wikipedia is one of the most commonly linked sites on the Internet. Here’s another secret—Wikipedia is vetted by volunteer academics. Wikipedia’s motto is “no original thought,” meaning that everything must be cited, and uncited material is quickly removed. In fact, studies have shown the Wikipedia is about as accurate as Britannica.

Here are two ways to use Wikipedia to improve learning outcomes in your classes:

Have Students Build Articles
In the Spring of 2008, Professor Jon Beasley-Murray at University of British Columbia had the students in his class “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation” create articles for Wikipedia on the books that they read. He transformed his students from learners to teachers, which improves outcomes. Plus, creating public work improves motivation as well as performance.

Importantly, the students were instructed to make contact with the Wikipedia editors—called the “FA Team”—to receive feedback on their work for revisions. The instructor had effectively enlisted outside academics as reviewers for his class. Wikipedia also has a quality ranking system that assigns “Good Article” or “Featured Article” status to exceptionally good works. About 1 in 800 articles reach Good Article status, while 1 in 1,200 reach Featured Article status. The instructor guaranteed his students an “A” for Good Articles, and an A+ for Featured Articles.

The results? The students, who worked in groups of two or three, produced three Featured Articles and eight Good Articles, an exceptional result given how few articles achieve these levels. These articles receive thousands of hits per month, demonstrating to students the value of their work. Now more than 20 universities have projects in Wikipedia.

Host a Course on Wikiversity
Wikimedia–the non-profit foundation that created Wikipedia–also hosts nine other wiki projects, including: Wikibook (free textbooks), Wikispecies (dictionary of species), and Wikiquote (compilation of quotes). One interesting site is Wikiversity, which provides a space for hosting courses or other content. An instructor can build a course page with syllabi, lesson plans, and other material for the students to access whenever they need it. That page can also be linked to other educational material such as videos.

Best yet, students can be given editing access to the page to add their own material. Groups can be assigned to add material to the course, such as resources for further exploration of the topics. Another option is to have the students build self-tests on the material using free web-based quiz functions for future students. This will enlist the students in an ongoing project of developing knowledge that outlives their particular class and is passed on to future generations of students.

Resources
The Latin American Literature Project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness
Guide for university projects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/Piotrus_educational_boilerplate
Listing of university projects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SUP
Guide for peer review of articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PR
Wikiversity: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page

John Orlando, PhD, is the Program Director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.