Faculty Resources

Resources for faculty who assign writing in their courses

Creating Effective Writing Assignments

In order to help students to learn critical thinking and engage with course material, writing assignments should be created with student learning outcomes in mind. According to Designing Writing Assignments by Traci Gardner, an effective writing assignment has to have to following things:

• The content and scope asked students to focus on critical thinking,
rather than reiteration, by interacting with a text.
• The organization and development provided scaffolding that supported
students' writing process.

• The audience for the assignment focused on communication with
an authentic group of readers regarding a topic on which the
writer was an expert.
• A range of choices for students' focus was balanced with support
and direction so that students could engage in the process
as equal partners, rather than be directed to complete teacher driven
tasks. (Peterson)

Essentially, writing assignments need to support student learning, provide an organized scaffolding for student work, provide an authentic audience, and provide choices for student engagement.

The entire book is available here:

http://wac.colostate.edu/books/gardner/

Plagiarism

Academic honesty is an issue that some of our students struggle with. The following resource is educational and has a test with a certificate your students can print out and turn in to you. We also recommend discussing this information in class.
https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/



Formatting Styles

Some students hear that their papers should be in APA, MLA or Chicago format and panic. At the writing center, we do help student understand the basics of these formats and why they matter. However, checking over students’ formatting is not a productive use of the student’s time in a writing center session. While citing sources is important, stressing formatting over the content of the paper hinders the learning process. For more information, please view the following presentation.

APA(nxiety), or, How to Help Our Students With APA

We also have for formatting listed under the "Writing Resources" tab.