Purpose: In the COVID-19 era, where blended learning is gaining popularity, research-informed teaching could be one of the alternatives or options to assess students' progress in Higher Education institutions. In the past, educators have assessed students' research skills gained from research-informed teaching through coursework components or…

Critical thinking (CT) is a 21st-century skill critical in education and learning. Second language teaching has focused on language form, and there needs to be a shift from form-focused instruction to a function-focused paradigm, where students simultaneously practice language learning and deal with real-world issues in authentic contexts…

Describes an extended writing assignment used in a business communication class that combines a case study and original student research, thus defining a realistic business situation needing action and requiring students to research a business situation and apply the findings from their research to decide exactly what course of action is…

When teachers work to create empathy that transfers or translates the experience of the other into an experience an individual has had, they promote a kind of egotism that dismisses the other or that reduces the other to the category of the self. The key problem with empathy of this sort is that the focus is not on the other, but on the self. The…

Discusses problems with freshman research paper assignments. Describes how one teacher has adapted cooperative learning techniques to research assignments, allowing students to work together in "base" and "expert" groups. Describes four structured writing assignments on a single subject of general public interest that lends itself to specialized…

Describes a research assignment that enables students to recognize the context of a document, extract the document's message, and determine its usefulness. Suggests possible warm-up activities for this assignment. (MM)

Describes a cross-disciplinary research paper assignment in which students engage in original research and interview an expert before researching in the library. (SR)

This paper presents materials related to an introduction to communication studies course, a sophomore-level course at Concordia College, Minnesota. The paper begins with discussions of the course philosophy and implementation, noting that the course design is based on a trajectory through three major units of study--definitions and processes of…

Describes the development of a course to teach undergraduates the historian's craft through the use of short, provocative books. Lists the books used in the course and how they were used. Discusses student writing assignments using archival materials that allow students to put their learning into practice. (DSK)

Describes a writing exercise with the "Oxford English Dictionary" that teaches students about research and attention to detail. Describes how the exercise, which involves the student in a set of serial tasks, makes students comfortable with the OED, teaches them how to extract full details of any word, and teaches students to take…

With rare exceptions, the assignment of a research paper elicits groans from students and sighs from their teachers, or worse. While the research paper became a fixture in composition textbooks and classrooms by the 1940s, its origins can be traced to fundamental changes in the American academy after the Civil War. The language of the term paper…

This paper describes the approach used successfully at California State University, Dominguez Hills, to instruct college students in the research paper writing process. To achieve the results, the instructor followed a specific set of steps during a class meeting set aside for this specialized training. This paper details each step in the…

A semester-long, introductory, freshman composition class (24 students) engaged in fieldwork, interviews, workshopping, a literature review, an ethnography, and a final paper allowing the student to critique their experiences with the ethnographic process. The first 2 weeks were spent familiarizing students with the ethnographic process. Through…

Suggests that using sociolinguistics as the subject of a semester-long course leads to real and exciting research rather than technically correct but lifeless "dummy runs" for real research in freshman composition courses. (MG)

Describes several relevant library search assignments which stress the merits of secondary research in a business report writing course. Includes assignments on investment possibilities, employment opportunities, and group projects. (MM)