This paper reports on the evaluation of an ambitious attempt to embed academic literacy support within a core content course for first-year students at the University of the South Pacific. The course is offered in both blended and online modes, catering for on-campus and off-campus students, respectively, using Moodle as the virtual learning…

Faculty from the chemistry and English departments have developed a combined second-semester honors general chemistry and college writing course that fosters critical thinking through challenging writing assignments. Examples of case-study writing assignments and guidelines are provided that faculty at other institutions can adapt in similar…

This paper describes a process for guiding students through the writing of a Professional Philosophy of Recreation Paper and a one-page philosophy statement suitable for use in students' professional portfolios. The authors describe how the review of recreation education literature, scholarship on teaching and learning, and assessment of student…

Political science faculty have access to a wealth of innovative pedagogies thanks to a comprehensive literature on teaching and learning in the discipline and related fields. Yet, from among the hundreds of documented possibilities, how does one go about deciding which to incorporate into a given course? Few articles have much to say in response…

Students in a general education science course made significant gains in scientific reasoning skills when they were taught using carefully designed hands-on activities and writing assignments. The activities required students to make use of scientific skills such as graphing, predicting outcomes under changing conditions, or designing experiments,…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' perceptions of a self-study assignment, a requirement for a life-span human development course. A survey assessing attitudes regarding the value of the writing assignment was completed by 278 students. Results suggested that students had an overall positive evaluation of the assignment. The…

The assessment of student learning in general education courses is of critical importance in higher education. This study examined the utility of a particular writing assignment, application essays, as a course assessment tool in a basic communication course. Application essays are one page compositions asking students to describe a communication…

An advanced composition curriculum was designed for a class of 20 juniors and seniors, and because of the constraints of a university grant with which it was associated, the majority of assignments had to be collaborative. The subject of investigation was composition. That is, the students were challenged to do what composition researchers and…

Described are experiences for incorporating writing assignments in mathematics and computer science courses. Reports survey results from students who participated in the courses. (YP)

While literature has often been ignored in the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) curriculum, there are good reasons for including it at all educational levels of ESL instruction. There are universal reasons for exploring literature, including the pleasure and escape it provides. In addition, ESL experts have found that literature encapsulates…