Expanding information related to environmental degradation is one potential approach to enhance students' environmental literacy and awareness (ecoliterate). This research investigates the relationship between students' skills in writing popular text-based articles and their ecological literacy. A quasi-experimental research design was employed…

Letters to the editor are an important part of democratic societies. In academic journals, letters serve as a form of postpublication review and thus permit continued discussion and debate of scientific ideas. However, letters and their importance are rarely taught to university students. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to propose a…

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…

Purpose: Current knowledge and research on students' utilization and interaction with generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their academic work is limited. This study aims to investigate students' engagement with these tools. Design/methodology/approach: This research used survey-based research to investigate generative AI literacy…

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…

The rise of AI generated texts offers promise but creates new challenges for social work teaching. A recent survey found that 89% of higher education students used AI on their homework. AI generated text may be difficult to distinguish from a student's own work, yet are being submitted as the student's own work. This poses new challenges to…

This essay proposes a pedagogical approach to writing instruction in universities facing familiar institutional goals and barriers alongside the heightened emotional complexities of students post-pandemic. Students at these universities often pursue vocational paths, yet since spring 2020, their interpersonal and cultural challenges have deepened,…

Purpose: This study contributes to the current body of literature on students' understanding of academic misconduct, plagiarism, forms of plagiarism, the reasons they plagiarize, the sanctions imposed by academics for plagiarizing and the methods to address plagiarism in written assessments within the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of…

The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate a multilingual automated essay scoring (AES) system for grading essays in three languages. Two different sentence embedding models were evaluated within the AES system, multilingual BERT (mBERT) and language-agnostic BERT sentence embedding (LaBSE). German, Italian, and Czech essays were…

In higher education, the role of assessment has evolved from serving only the purpose of evaluation of the outcomes of the learning process to assessment as part of the learning purposes. Summative or formative, the potential of assessment to facilitate learning is now recognised. Feedback is one of the most influential factors on learning but is…

The importance of language in the learning process of students has been studied extensively. However, little attention has been paid to the role language plays in the assessment of student writings. Students and instructors at a liberal arts and sciences college were interviewed to reveal their approaches to written assignments. The aim was to…

The blog and distance learning: the former can enhance, enlighten, and elevate the educational experience for the student and the teaching experience for the instructor. And blogs are especially suited for the asynchronous environment where nearly everything is written and remains throughout the course, so students can continually refer to the…

In this study at a research-intensive public university, a group of eight instructors across a range of disciplines designed a writing assignment in which students (n=104) chose to write to one of three audiences--the teacher, a novice, or an adjacent expert. Students were then asked to complete a questionnaire that included open-ended questions…

This study examines the extent to which verb argument construction (VAC) based indices of syntactic complexity could predict four different writing task conditions: a simple task with no repetition (S + NR), a simple task with repetition (S + R), a complex task with no repetition (C + NR), and a complex task with repetition (C + R). Ninety-six…

Students need feedback from instructors to learn from their mistakes and improve their academic skills. Responding to student writing is a central and necessary component of the instructor-student feedback loop. There are many forms of feedback on written assignments, and not all of them have the same role in supporting student learning. For…