Build It and They Will Come Designing Effective Writing Assignments Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop Center for Educational Practice

Promoting Reflective Practice Assessment as Continual Improvement

Promoting Student Learning Evaluating student performance vs Evaluating the success of how we are asking students to perform

Evaluating Student Performance Evidence of student writing problems

Compose an Assignment A standard assignment in your discipline

Developing Expectations What will be the rate of student success in response to the assignment?

An Assessment Process Continuous improvement cycle applied to writing assignments

Assignment ResponseEvaluate Blame Unreflective Practice

Assignment ResponseEvaluate Revise Reflective Practice

Issues in Effective Design Distinguishing between what we want students to do and how we want them to communicate what they’ve done.

Process vs Product Circle process tasks and underline product tasks in writing assignment

Process Tasks Critical reading Conducting research Analyzing information Drawing conclusions Writing process

Product Tasks Number of pages or words Focus, organization, development Presentation format Documentation format Style and correctness

Revising Assignment Separate process and product tasks and reorder, putting process tasks first and then product tasks second.

Improving Process Demonstrate process Support process Evaluate process

Improving Product Samples of product Review work-in-progress Evaluation criteria

Evaluating Assignment 1. Track success of assignment by estimating success rate and then comparing to actual success rate 2. Ask students to evaluate assignment 3. Ask colleagues to evaluate assignment

Assignment ResponseEvaluate Revise Reflective Practice