Master-level postgraduate professional development (PPD) programs have grown rapidly in many parts of the world. Being able to complete written assignments successfully is a significant concern for students pursuing PPD studies. Yet the nature of written assignments in such programs has been under-researched. This paper reports a study conducted…

This My Favorite Assignment (MFA) article features 11 teaching innovations first presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication Annual International Conference held Denver, Colorado, USA. These assignments are designed to boost students' writing, persuasion, crisis management skills, and personal and professional development.

This paper reports on a qualitative study of 13 bilingual paraprofessionals at a university in the USA enrolled in a second language acquisition class that was part of a professional development programme. Drawing on socio-cultural theory, the study focused on documenting how the paraprofessionals negotiated the academic demands of a hybrid online…

Developing a professional identity is a key element of the transition into the teaching profession. Limited research exists on professional development activities and ideas that support beginning teachers' development of their professional identity in practice. For this study teachers participated in an induction programme that focused on…

Evaluation of student written work during summative assessments is an important and critical task for instructors at all educational levels. Nevertheless, few research studies exist that provide insights into how different instructors approach this task. Chemistry faculty (FIs) and graduate student instructors (GSIs) regularly engage in the…

Peer evaluation provides an opportunity to give and receive feedback on work in a structured setting. Instructors can utilise peer evaluation as an opportunity to teach and for students to practice metacognition along with other professional skills. Second year Master of Public Health students in a professional development capstone course…

The creation of ePortfolios as a capstone project for school counselors-in-training has many benefits for the students, instructors, and program. However, there can be tension due to misalignments in goals and lived experiences of the ePortfolio even when the students find ePortfolios useful. This paper explores this tension between instructor…

To help graduate students with academic writing, a college of education at a large university implemented a new service, Writing Support Circles. Based on the results of the first series of this service, we changed its design. The purpose of this article is to share how changes in the design affected these adult learners' writing self-efficacy and…

This study explored graduate teaching assistant (GTA) grading on 480 papers across two writing assignments as integrated into large Introductory Psychology courses. We measured GTA accuracy, consistency, and commenting (feedback) quality. Results indicate that GTA graders improved, although unevenly, in accuracy and consistency from Time 1 to 2…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

As public relations professions advance toward new media platforms, one traditional tool--the backgrounder/position paper (more technically termed white paper) remains a compelling vehicle to impart enduring professional competencies. Moreover, the skills requisite to produce a white paper can be deployed in a variety of new and traditional media…

Capstone courses emphasize students' experiences and learning, rather than course content. This emphasis is consistent with principles and practices fundamental to humanistic education. Here we describe a capstone course, "Internship," that includes five features consistent with humanistic education: (1) student-centered learning, (2) empathic…

Considerable research has now been undertaken into the development of different approaches to exploiting language corpora for pedagogic purposes in the context of ESP. The question of how language corpora might be utilized by students beyond the immediate language-teaching context is, however, one as yet seldom addressed in the literature. This…