Last semester, when Introduction to Sociology enrolled 143 students, Dr. Kody Steffy ran an experiment. He used an alternative grading system, ungrading, and replaced exams with writing assignments that built toward essays for an e-book. You can see the e-book that resulted from students’ reading, discussions, journal entries, drafting, and revising, on Kody’s website. I… Read more »
Dr. Cydney McGuire teaches health policy for the O’Neill School of Environmental and Public Affairs. I’ve learned a lot from her approach to using writing to advance her students’ learning in an undergraduate course with 60 students; I asked her to share her insights. Why do you assign your students to write and speak, rather… Read more »
Writing Tutorial Services (WTS), our writing center here at IUB, offers students free one-on-one help with any phase of the writing process—from brainstorming to revising a nearly final draft. Our goal is for tutorials to be a supplement to, not a replacement for, meetings with instructors. I’ll admit that I’m biased, as I run the… Read more »
If you’re asking your students to avoid using AI for writing projects, alert them to the importance of their document’s version history. This record of how a file has changed over time is automatically created in cloud-based documents, like Google Docs or Microsoft Word Online. Generally, a writer can see their document’s version history by… Read more »
With a new semester a few weeks away, many of us are preparing syllabi, establishing schedules, and considering assignments. It’s an opportune time to ask, why are we having students write (or speak, make videos, etc.)? And, just as importantly, how are we conveying our rationale to students? Without such explanation, students might interpret assignments… Read more »
Information literacy is crucial to any conceivable profession and to personal decisions ranging from health to finances (plus, I would argue, to forging a collective future on our planet). Yet, it’s getting harder to teach students how to discern credible sources. As a millennial, I’ve observed the Internet evolve into a homogenous marketing tool. A… Read more »