Assignment Design Across the Curriculum Susan McLeod, UC Santa Barbara CCCC 2004
How do we help faculty in the disciplines understand the need to make their tacit assumptions about what constitutes good writing more explicit in their writing assignments?
A faculty workshop is the best place to work on assignment design. One good way to start is to hand out several examples of poor assignments (e.g., “A twenty-page term paper on a subject of your choice is due on the last day of the term” or “Write five summaries of journal articles”). Ask the faculty to imagine that they are the student receiving the assignment and respond in writing for five minutes to the following questions:
Do you understand what you are supposed to do? Do you need more information? Can you revise the assignment to make it better or clearer?
During the discussion, faculty are usually very articulate about what's missing: a reason for the assignment, guidance as to length, etc. You can then work backwards to a discussion of what makes a good writing assignment.
This is a useful quote to help faculty understand how to make writing assignments more like professional writing tasks:
In all too many instances, at least in college, students write the wrong thing, for the wrong reason, to the wrong person, who evaluates in on the wrong basis. That is, they write about a subject they are not thoroughly informed upon, in order to exhibit knowledge rather than explain something the reader does not understand, and they write to a professor who already knows more than they do about the matter and who evaluates the papers not in terms of what he or she has derived, but in terms of what he or she thinks the writer knows. In every respect, this is the converse of what happens in professional life, where the writer is the authority; he or she writes to transmit new or unfamiliar information to someone who does not know but needs to, and who evaluates the paper in terms of what he derives and understands.
W.Earl Britton, "What is Technical Writing?" College Composition and Communication 16 (May 1965): 113-116 (revised for inclusive language).
See reverse for suggestions on making and presenting assignments. |