Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices |Teaching with Technology| Sample Course Evaluation Forms
Teaching Tools
2. Teaching Practices
2.1. Activities and Objectives
Process of Guiding Student Writing
Identify general learning goals
Sometimes instructors ask students to write papers because that's the way they were taught and it seems like a good way to help ensure that students gain experience in thinking independently.
However, a writing assignment can obviously have many different functions within a particular class.
Ask yourself:
- What are my goals for students?
- What do I want them to learn from this assignment?
- Do I only want them to gain content knowledge?
- Do I also want them to gain skills in the process?
- How can I make my goals explicit to students?
EXAMPLE: Thinking carefully about what you want students to learn from the writing assignment will help you make decisions that provide the scaffolding for student performance. Let's say that your highest goal is for students to gain experience in what counts as an argument in your field.
In this case, just writing a paper won't get them that experience. You'd also want students to:
- Read papers written by people in the field.
- Analyze and think about what makes those papers different from others.
- Hold class discussions
- Offer opportunities to meet with you individually.
- Ask students to complete peer reviews.
There are many different learning goals, and because of their previous writing experiences, students will bring many of these goals to an assignment unless you explicitly tell them that your goal for them is different.
- Some common learning goals:
- Analyze the logic of someone's argument.
- Synthesize different positions and evaluate which position has the greatest internal consistency.
- Extrapolate from ideas developed in class to suggest what might happen in the future, or how a past event might have changed had economic conditions differed.
- Develop support for own position.
- Examine one's own stance.
- Practice using research techniques learned in class (after having practiced on clearly-defined problems) on an ill-defined problem.
- Apply an intellectual framework to a new problem.
- Use theoretical criteria discuss in class to solve a real-world problem.
- Report on research findings.
- Gain more knowledge about what counts as knowledge within a particular field.
- Consider your student audience:
- How much do you know about them?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses in writing?
- How much experience do they have in the kind of writing you're asking them to do?
- Based on your knowledge of the student population with which you're working, where are they likely to encounter difficulty?
- What can you do to try to avoid or eliminate potential problems?
- Provide support for student learning:
- Identify all of your goals and clearly articulate them to your students to help them meet your expectations.
- Offer models of what the completed assignment might look like.
- Discuss models in class, using average-range papers as the basis for discussion.
- Provide clear criteria for how you will evaluate the final paper.
- Discuss the criteria in class to clear up any misconceptions.
- Recommend the stages you might expect students to go through as they complete their paper (e.g. brainstorming, researching, discussing their topic with you, refining their topic, drafting, and then refining the introduction and conclusion).
- Provide opportunities for them to revise their papers.
- Provide opportunities for them to receive feedback on their work before they receive their final grade.
Develop writing assignments based on criteria useful for evaluation.
Once you have articulated your learning goals for your students, your next goal should be to determine what kind of assignment (or series of assignments) will best allow you to assess student learning and competencies and to design an appropriate assignment.
EXAMPLE 1: Lab Reports
Let's say that your learning goal is for students to learn how to write clear lab reports by the end of the semester.
When students are writing a lab report, they will need to be paying attention to multiple issues at one time. How can you get them to pay attention to each of these issues?
Begin by telling them that your overall goal is writing clear lab reports, but on this particular lab report, your goal might be to focus on writing a clear methods section. This doesn't mean that you won't grade them on overall clarity, but it does mean that you may give them a separate score for the clarity of their methods section.
By giving students separate scores you can help them identify their strengths and weaknesses.
EXAMPLE 2: Essay Assignment
If your learning goal is for students to be able to think like someone in your discipline (i.e., a historian, an economist), you may be able to break down the assignment according to the different thinking skills you might expect them to use for the assignment.
For instance, identifying appropriate source materials is a difficult task. If students submit a separate assignment identifying their source materials and explaining their reasoning for why these materials are appropriate (or of sufficiently high standard), this gives you an opportunity to discuss why some printed materials are of poorer quality.
If you want your students to include empirical studies, assessing their evaluations of the quality of empirical works cited might be a separate criterion.
The use of criteria will help students focus on those features of the assignment that you find most important.
Develop case-specific criteria
Your criteria may be in a state of flux as you develop the assignment and further clarify what you want students to learn, but identifying the criteria can help you give clearer instructions and help your students complete the assignment more successfully.
Think about:
- What general criteria you would expect from any student paper.
- Specifically, what kinds of intellectual work you expect students to do in this assignment.
For instance, you would expect an introduction in any paper a student might write. In a history essay, you might expect background knowledge, but you probably don't want a memory dump of all the events covered in the class.
By telling students what you do -- and don't -- want in the introduction, you give them guidance in how to succeed and how (in this case) to write like a historian.
Try to limit the number of criteria you use to no more than nine. You may also find it useful to group criteria so that students see the principles at stake in the criteria you are giving them. (Sample criteria sheets are available elsewhere in this section.)
If you are working with a TA or grader, share criteria with them and talk with them about your criteria to ensure that you both agree. Determine (through discussion) what constitutes adequate performance on the assignment. It is unlikely that you and your TA or grader will have similar standards, so if they are important, share your ideas.
Communicate and explain the criteria to students
Do not plan to simply give the criteria to students in writing, instead discuss the criteria with them.
Give students opportunities to practice applying the criteria to their own and others' papers (for instance, in a peer review).
Ask students to:
- Think about whether model papers demonstrate or fail to demonstrate the stated criteria.
- Evaluate their own final assignments based on these criteria.
- This assumes that your criteria are clear indicators of what is important in your course.
Evaluate student papers based on criteria
Grade the assignments, or work with TAs or graders to grade the assignments.
- Group papers into three categories (strong, average, weak).
- Use the criteria sheets to identify strengths and weaknesses.
- You may even want to give students an overall grade and then also give them specific comments for each of your criteria.
If more than one person is grading, after grading three to five papers individually, compare and verify your own results with those of other grades. To what extent do you agree? If necessary, revise your grades so that all grades are more consistent.
If you find that your overall grades do not correlate with the kinds of comments you are making on your criteria sheets, you may want to make a note and revise your criteria sheet for the next paper so it better captures the categories you are using for your overall grade.
Provide feedback to students
Using your criteria sheet as a guide:
- Note for students where the greatest number of problems seemed to arise.
- Provide students some examples of how these problems could have been avoided or eliminated.
By commenting on particular criteria and their effect in the overall paper, you help students focus on particular features that influence the strength of their own writing.
When you teach the next assignment (or the next section of this course), you may want to emphasize potential student problems early on.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
