Our service learning research includes assessment of reflective assignments done by students who apply theoretical knowledge in practical, real-life contexts by working with actual clients. For many of these students our classes are a departure from traditional forms of learning, and a challenge to their ability to apply what they know in often…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

A writing-across-the-curriculum and ethics component is presented for a second-semester, physical chemistry course. The activity involves introducing ethical issues pertinent to scientists. Students are asked to read additional material, participate in discussions, and write essays and a paper on an ethical issue. The writing and discussion…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…

From the first days of medical school, students are socialized into the medical environment. They are trained to view patients as the "other." The medical humanities have been introduced into the curriculum of most medical schools as a means to counteract the possible effects of this "othering." In particular, writing exercises…

Monroe Community College's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) program, designed to help students learn to write in all disciplines through writing centers staffed by student writing fellows, is reviewed in this report. The report includes the following sections: the year in review; 1994-95 Writing Fellows; WAC faculty; statistical data; writing…