In response to the national excitement around course embedded assessment, various campuses and state-wide college systems engaged in faculty development in assignment prompt development drawn from the literature focused on creating assignments for the classroom. However, while the literature is replete with frameworks, templates, guides,…

This paper describes the collaboration of a Writing Center director and a professor of a Fisheries Biology course in support of a research paper entitled, "The World Without," which asks students to convince readers of the likely ecological consequences associated with the extinction of a finfish species or aquatic habitat. Opportunities…

The technology company OpenAI released a generative artificial intelligence program that can create detailed written responses, write essays, poetry, code, and much more, in response to short written prompts. It had been years in the making and had been exposed to over 40 gigabytes of text, webpages, images, and other content. ChatGPT is a large…

We are living through a very difficult moment in human history where we are having to make almost daily decisions about our health, occupations, environment, economics, and democracy, while being bombarded with disinformation, misinformation, and "alternative facts" relative to those decisions. A highly developed information literacy…

After ten years of public school teaching and countless student teaching observations, the author knows firsthand that English language arts (ELA) teachers are committed to teaching researched argumentative writing and, further, they often frame their assignments as questions. In this article, the author proposes that ELA teachers accelerate…

The insufficient focus on developing writing instruction in education is a significant problem. Despite the crucial link between writing and reading skills and their impact on academic and life success, there is a notable lack of emphasis on writing in schools. Writing A-Z is a digital-first program that helps teachers establish a writing…

Essay exams offer many benefits for instructors who seek to vary their assessment methods and engage students in critical discourse, yet they also pose many challenges and require thoughtful construction and evaluation. The author provides an extensive overview of the literature to illuminate best practices for designing and assessing effective…

The purpose of this article was to look at some of the issues students have with reading and interpreting their instructors' post-secondary writing prompts. Every student, who attends a post-secondary institution, will at some point in their university/college career be asked to submit a writing assignment of some kind. The most common assignment…

In this article Karen Adams demonstrates how to incorporate group grammar techniques into a classroom activity. In the activity, students practice using the target grammar to do something they naturally enjoy: learning about each other.

To promote the development of greater creativity in my students' design work, I created an online tool--called Reflective Inquiry (RI)--that accompanies all of my open-ended assignments and that I require students to submit with each project. The RI is composed of a series of prompts that students must respond to, almost daily, to explain and…

The author discusses their experiences teaching an upper-division seminar course in a traditional face-to-face setting, and re-designing a "long eighteenth century" survey course for delivery online. The article thus explores spatial strategies in both face-to-face and online courses, and suggests ways in which they can be particularly…

This piece focuses on increasing writing instruction for secondary English teacher candidates in the form of integrating reading and writing. Often, teacher candidates are not sufficiently prepared in university coursework to teach writing and are left to rely on formulaic writing that merely prepares their students for the end-of-year tests.…

As an often recommended but under-utilized pedagogical strategy, writing in mathematics has many benefits for students. However, creating and grading worthwhile writing projects can be more time-consuming than utilizing more traditional forms of assessment. This paper provides a concrete example of a writing project prompt, questions, directions,…

The 2007-2009 financial crisis was such a momentous time that entire business courses could be devoted to its study. While some schools may undertake that task, this paper discusses ways in which students may learn about the crisis as part of an established course in economics or finance departments. Popular press books are highlighted, and…

For almost 40 years, the Minute Paper has been a quick and easy means of learning assessment, both in the college classroom and in library instruction. More recently, the use of social media, particularly selfies, has gained popularity by connecting with students through the technology with which they are most familiar. This article makes the case…