The author of this article describes an intermediate economics course structured around outside readings, which include academic journal papers, policy briefs, and news articles. Students complete low-stakes, high-frequency writing assignments that promote accountability and encourage critical thinking about the readings. This pairing of outside…

Science fiction literature and film are an underappreciated source for the teaching of history. Finding material that can excite a student's curiosity can be a key towards greater student engagement, especially among students who are taking history as a requirement, rather than from interest. The discovery that they can read or watch science…

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…

Objective: The objective of this study was threefold: (a) to create a rubric for response complexity (RC), defined as an admixture of response length, grammatical diversity, categorisation, and sophistication; (b) to measure behavioural and cognitive engagement through students' written responses on a school-based written activity, and (c) to…

Background: This study breaks new ground by presenting a new, more sophisticated model of learning engagement that goes beyond the current state of the art embodied in the widely used Affective-Behavioral-Cognitive (ABC) model. This work synthesizes and builds upon neglected lines of research in the structure of affective engagement. It also…

Social annotation plays a crucial role in nurturing and sustaining a collaborative reading community, offering the potential to enhance students' motivation and performance within socially supportive learning environments. Nonetheless, research on the dynamic changes in student engagement in social annotation remains limited. This study aims to…

Reflective Learning Journals are used to engage students in the learning process. To motivate students to complete the Reflective Learning Journal it is common practice to allocate marks and it is in this area that problems arise. To address the problems rubrics have been used however, most rubrics are based on assigning marks to very…

The present study investigated the impact of a utility-value intervention on students' behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement. Students assigned to the intervention condition were required to write an essay to connect the course contents with their personal hobbies, interests, or goals three times during the course. The results showed…

This teaching note presents an assignment in which students write an op-ed on a course-related issue and submit it to a newspaper. I argue that an op-ed assignment dovetails with pedagogical goals around democratic citizenship and public sociology. I explain the project's objectives, instructions, and timeline. I present evidence from three…

Artificial intelligence assignments lead this article's 11 teaching innovations selected from the "My Favorite Assignments" presented at the 2023 Association for Business Communication's (ABC's) 88th Annual International Conference held in the Mile-High City: Denver, Colorado, USA. Pedagogy presented here also includes ideas to enhance…

In this article, the authors contribute to the conversation on High Impact Practice (HIPs) focusing on the connection between sense of accomplishment and what is high impact by discussing data from their study of signature assignments. Signature assignments are assignments within a single course or unit that give students choice, require synthesis…

A commonly-held belief is that many university students are 'assessment-driven'; that is, students engage more with activities that are assessed compared with those that are not. 'Incentivised engagement' includes the practice of providing incentives (such as marks or otherwise) for students to engage in particular activities. Perusall is a social…

With increasing calls for authentic assessment in higher education, the reference point for authenticity has been questioned. Typically, researchers define authenticity in relation to purposes of higher education, which are contested. Advancing the notion of educational authenticity rather than professional, societal, disciplinary, or…

Utility value interventions (UVIs) are brief assignments designed to promote students' perceived utility value of the content they are learning. UVIs have been shown to improve students' academic performance in varying STEM courses; however, the use of UVIs in either chemistry courses or upper-level courses has not been well explored. This study…

Students are often unmotivated to engage with their online coursework. Research has shown that concretely visualizing one's goals (e.g., photo-taking) can improve motivation to learn. This study explored the effect of taking a photo of one's study space (i.e., a "studygram" photo similar to a post on Instagram) on students' motivation to…