A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map strategies for reading and writing.
Tag: writing assignments
Social Learning via Improved Daily Writing Assignments, Implementation of Study Groups, and Well-Structured Daily Class Discussions
As recent scholarship emphasizes the value of social learning, this article describes a course redesign that sought to encourage such social learning. This multi-year course redesign includes altering a daily writing assignment to make it more specific and to make it a contribution to the learning of a study group. Data was collected and evaluated to explore the effectiveness of this change. The author also offers reflections on how the course redesign encouraged social learning via study groups and how the redesign made daily class discussions more deliberate and robust.