Students in a senior English class examined the question of whether the "wisdom of experts" or "the wisdom of crowds" is more reliable and useful in a writing course by engaging in a parallel Wikipedia project. Each student either created a new entry or made significant changes to an existing Wikipedia entry, tracked changes to…

Argumentation is one of the central practices in science learning and helps deepen students' conceptual understanding. Students should learn how to communicate ideas including procedure tests, data interpretations, and investigation outcomes in verbal and written forms through argument structure. This article presents a negotiation model to…

One challenge teachers of students with orthopedic and multiple disabilities face is providing sufficient time and opportunity to communicate. This challenge is universal across countries, schools, and settings: teachers want students to communicate because communication lies at the core of what makes us human. Yet students with orthopedic and…

This paper describes a collaboration between a mathematician and a compositionist who developed a sequence of collaborative writing assignments for calculus. This sequence of developmentally appropriate assignments presents peer review as a collaborative process that promotes reflection, deepens understanding, and improves exposition. First, we…

The value of reflective writing assignments as learning tools for business students has been well-established. While the management education literature includes numerous examples of such assignments that are based on Kolb's (1984) experiential learning model, many of them engage only the first two phases of the model. When students do not move…

In this article, the authors report the importance of teaching students about collaborative writing. When teachers are effective in helping students to learn processes for collaborative writing, everyone involved needs to speak, listen, write, and read about how to write well and what makes writing good. Students are forced to "go meta"…

Writing Center faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina teach humanities courses in which we include literary texts that are not ostensibly "about health care" to introduce to students how unique an illness narrative can be--to challenge, in fact, preconceived notions student may have about what "counts" as a…

Although considerable attention has been directed at improving the quality of students' writing, the investigation and definition of "good writing" has remained primarily within the realm of the normative and prescriptive. Social scientists and humanists often clash over the definition of valid and reliable writing assessment, as well as…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…

This study examines 143 graduate assignments across 12 faculties or schools in a Canadian university in order to identify types of writing tasks. Based on the descriptions provided by the instructors, we identified nine types of assignments, with scholarly essay being the most common, followed by summary and response, literature review, project,…

Students often enter community college with little proficiency in writing. The authors of this paper share a series of writing assignments designed to help students develop writing and critical thinking abilities throughout their community college experience. The first is a series of relatively low-stakes exercises aimed at helping beginning…

This article explores the role of personal storytelling about social identity-related experiences in two diversity courses that were informed by social justice education pedagogies with a focus on race/ethnicity and racism. The two courses included racially diverse groups of students in two undergraduate diversity courses at two Northeast…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

In the course of normal classroom lessons, 103 students (median 11.10 years) were asked to spend 15 min writing "anything you can think of" about the number 50 on a blank page. The products were independently scored by 2 specialist art teachers and 2 specialist mathematics teachers on criteria relevant to their specialisations.…

Background: The active involvement of learners as critical, reflective and capable agents in the learning process is a core aim in contemporary education policy in Australia, and is regarded as a significant factor for academic success. However, within the relevant literature, the issue of positioning students as agents in the learning process has…