Technology has made a significant impact on assessment, including its use to automate assignment submission. On-line assignment submission, marking, and return were introduced into a fourth-year engineering management unit for the first time, and a formal evaluation was undertaken to assess student perceptions of this new development. Nearly all…

Provides examples and a summary of the results of a survey completed by nonscience majors (n=57). Students provided information about the importance of chemistry to their majors and argued their point of view in a paper. (DDR)

Analyzed 17 personal attributes of 160 undergraduate students who wrote reports on a computer or by hand, and compared differences in the quality of computer and handwritten reports with each student's personal attributes. Concludes that some attributes do relate to computer writing quality. (JMV)

Graduate and undergraduate students are typically required to become educated consumers of research. Yet, research courses generally focus on how to do research rather than how to evaluate it. Therefore, we propose ways in which faculty can help their students become better consumers of research by presenting a brief list of teaching objectives,…

This paper discusses a model for teaching leadership to first-year students as part of a learning community. It outlines the purpose and structure of the course and presents ideas for how different disciplines could be combined with leadership in learning communities. Teaching leadership to first-year students as part of a learning community…

The struggle in the composition community regarding the place of personal narrative in academic writing became particularly acute for a class of undergraduate Critical Writing students undertaking ethnographic work. By mid-semester, students had read and produced a series of texts about culture and found themselves reading and writing about…

A short story assignment incorporates creative writing into the syllabus of a freshman composition class, while erasing the misconception that creative writing is something a "regular" student cannot do. Students write a rough draft both of a personal experience essay and of a short story. Based on peer-reviews of both, students choose…

Discusses having students in an undergraduate mass communication theory class create metaphors of their own relationships with mass media. Highlights literature in the field related to critical thinking and teaching methods. Describes application of the assignment. Notes that this assignment provides the professor with a means to evaluate…

This article focuses on a study of undergraduates writing an essay for a remedial writing course that tested two devices, an uncertainty expansion device and an uncertainty reduction device. Highlights include Kuhlthau's information search process model, and enabling technology devices for the information needs of information retrieval system…

Lecturers who use the one-minute paper generally praise it as a learning tool, for the teacher as well as the students. This article surveys the literature on this widely applicable technique and presents new evidence on students opinions of it and the extent of its use in the classroom. The benefits for both students and teachers appear sizeable…

Educational data indicate that the ability to write effectively is vital to the success of a scientist and is a skill that most science educators try to foster. Within the Grants-In-Aid (GIA) program, sponsored by the New Jersey Academy of Science (NJAS), 65 to 70 high school students are given guidelines on how to write a formal scientific…

Courtroom scenes in literature seem to have a special magic with students (probably because of all the trials seen on television, fiction or non-fiction). Students in a composition and literature course at the University of Nebraska, after reading Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," wrote "closing arguments" for either…

A naturalistic study of 21 college students (at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania) writing research papers provides detailed analyses of the roles that notetaking, planning, goal-setting, and revising play in students' approaches and examines whether these "high investment" reading and writing processes lead to higher quality…

An exercise in ghostwriting--a process where the reader completes a section of the text in the reader's head based on clues in the text--was used in freshman composition and upper-level composition classes to get students to concentrate on their reading processes. In this assignment, a short story was chosen from which different portions of the…

Composition classrooms are the place to talk specifically about the rhetoricity of writing in academic disciplines. Students can use personal experiences to understand what it means to see themselves as aggressive or passive participants of various institutions. Too often students do not understand themselves as having any authority, but are…