The chapter describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of repeated peer review assignments in a health sciences program. Details of the assignment, quantitative and qualitative indirect assessments, and considerations for implementing this type of assignment in other courses are provided.

Drawing on the scholarship of writing and learning, this article motivates the use of writing assignments in analytics courses and develops a framework for instructional design that advances both writing skills and discipline-specific learning. We translate a best practices set of foundational writing concepts into a matrix of design levers for…

This article describes the use of feedback-oriented online assignments in large classes of undergraduate students studying anatomy and physiology to promote active learning, critical thinking, and effective written communication skills.

Writing is one of the productive skills for language learners. This study was conducted to design a unit for language students who were enrolled in the School of Foreign Languages in one of the most prestigious Turkish state universities located in Istanbul. These learners had been taught different academic essay types in this educational…

To help graduate students with academic writing, a college of education at a large university implemented a new service, Writing Support Circles. Based on the results of the first series of this service, we changed its design. The purpose of this article is to share how changes in the design affected these adult learners' writing self-efficacy and…

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…

At the Danish University School of Education we have experimented with a form of assessment called "active participation". A week before each class students are given reading guidelines and questions to help them approach the texts, and on the basis of one of those questions the students each write a two-page essay. The students are…

In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in "College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction" in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of…

As public relations professions advance toward new media platforms, one traditional tool--the backgrounder/position paper (more technically termed white paper) remains a compelling vehicle to impart enduring professional competencies. Moreover, the skills requisite to produce a white paper can be deployed in a variety of new and traditional media…

Because of the recent revolutionary developments brought about by Web 2.0, the emergence and popularity of blogs as learning tools represent an important area of consideration by the higher education sector. Indeed, while many researchers have acknowledged the advantages of using blogs in this environment, it is clear that more investigation is…

In vocational education, a challenging issue is to help apprentices build integrated knowledge from workplace training and school teaching. The present research proposes a learning design in which apprentices are required to write with a reciprocal peer-tutoring approach about situations they encountered in the workplace in order to help in…

This paper is a literature review report concerning educational uses of Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its existence. The aim of the work is the tracing and the presentation of published and validated educational applications of Wikipedia in a manner that could inform learning design by teachers or researchers. For the review, 24 scientific…

Focused freewriting, broadly defined as writing without stopping and editing about a specific topic, has been viewed and used as a powerful tool for developing student writing in a wide spectrum of educational contexts. This study aimed to further explore the use of focused freewriting in the context of promoting students' academic skills…

In this author's research, the question of whether it makes sense to think of writing primarily as a generic skill acquired increasing urgency as she gathered qualitative data for a study of the relationship between instructors' expectations in the design of writing assignments and the students' thinking as evidenced both in their essay responses…

As the global economy becomes more integrated, incorporating international experiences into college curricula becomes increasingly desirable for American students and their counterparts abroad. This paper describes one model for creating an international, Web-based, distance-learning classroom that can be used as a guide for those who might wish…