The IU2030 Strategic Plan’s emphasis on “meaningful and mentored research and creative experiences” for undergraduates is an opportunity to think about how we support our seniors’ writing thesis and capstone projects. Thesis writing can be overwhelming: often a student’s first foray into long-term research projects feels like a completely different experience to classes and coursework…. Read more »
Convincing students of the value of crafting essays can be a daunting task at the best of times. With services such as ChatGPT that offer easy alternatives to the painstaking work of drafting and revision, many instructors are concerned that students may be more tempted than ever to forego the time commitment of writing and… Read more »
Some students begin their post-secondary education with substantial experience in conducting research and properly citing sources while other students are less familiar with established research practices. At the college level, policies regarding citations, using sources, and avoiding plagiarism vary from course to course. Teaching your students how to handle research within your course will help… Read more »
Peer review—the process of engaging students in providing feedback on each other’s work—is one of the most productive practices for courses that integrate any form of writing. While receiving useful feedback from their peers, students discover how others approach writing tasks. In doing so, students learn how to give, receive, and integrate feedback—skills that are… Read more »
As Grant Wiggins asserts in Seven Keys to Effective Feedback, “Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).” But what kinds of feedback are effective in prompting students to learn?… Read more »
As John Warner notes in Why They Can’t Write, “there’s little dispute that grades do more harm than good in helping students learn writing” (2018, p. 213). Grades are both a disincentive for students to learn and an imprecise measure of what they have learned. Students in classrooms with traditional grading practices—that is, those that… Read more »