IDP NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE: February 1998

Michael Flanigan is the Earl A. Brown Jr. and Betty Galt Brown Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Director of English Composition. Flanigan came to OU in 1981 and has directed many workshops for faculty members focusing on how to use writing to help students learn. This essay reflects his latest ideas about what can be done by faculty members who want to use writing assignments in their courses but who hesitate because of the bad experiences they have had with these activities in the past.

Have your writing assignments for students turned out the way you had hoped, or have they put you to sleep? Have your students produced thoughtfully written papers that meet your goals and that promote the kind of learning you desire, or have they bored and frustrated you to exasperation? You are not alone if you feel an ambivalence toward students' writing assignments.

For years, I have heard faculty members express dissatisfaction with the quality of written work they get from students, and lately I think I have figured out some of the reasons for the lack of focus, quality, and thoroughness that often await us after we have given an assignment.

For the last five years, I have been examining the role of writing in fostering learning among undergraduates at the University of Oklahoma. In 1992, I started a research project that followed a group of entering firstyear students (118 initially) through their university careers.

Each semester, students were interviewed four times, all their writing from each of their courses was collected, as were syllabi, writing assignments, and whatever else we felt pertained to writing and how it influenced student learning in the various disciplines students enrolled in. Over the five years of the study, I came to see how some writing experiences furthered student learning and intellectual growth, while others seemed to hinder, or at least not enhance, intellectual growth.

Many of the writing problems that we saw in our study could be traced to the nature of the writing assignment. Some instructors gave clear, welldeveloped writing assignments, and others did not. In interview after interview, when students were asked"What has the teacher focused on when grading and evaluating the essays you have written? What are the criteria?"many students commented that they had no idea what criteria were being used to assess their written work.

Although some students were clear about what their instructors were using as criteria, the number who had no idea was disturbing. So, as part of the study, we did a close analysis of writing assignments that were presented in the syllabi we gathered, and we found that, in courses where students had no idea of what criteria were being used to evaluate them, often the directions from the instructor were confusing and undeveloped.

From this research, I have devised a set of guidelines that I think can be of use to others as they contemplate using writing to teach the ways of thinking, research, and discourse of their disciplines.

Setting Realistic Goals

When teachers create writing assignments, they obviously do so because they believe students will learn more, explore issues in greater depth, connect real experience with classroom knowledge, or engage the discipline in some way that can only be realized through shaping knowledge and learning in written language. Knowing that writing can enhance student learning is the starting point. The next step is figuring out what you believe writing will do for you and your students. In other words:

• What is it that you want to accomplish by having students write?
• Do you want them to describe an experience using a particular frame of reference as the School of Music does when it asks students to attend concerts and write up those experiences using concepts, vocabulary, structures, and ways of thinking that are peculiar to the discipline?
• Do you want students to conduct an experiment and write up the procedures and results so that you can see that they understand certain processes?
• Do you want students to read an article, react to it using a particular theory as the basis of criticism, and then evaluate the inclusiveness of the theory? How to Create Writing Assignments for Students That You Actually Look Forward to Reading Continued on page 2 By Michael C. Flanigan

Whatever your goals, it is important to make them clear both to yourself and to your students. If you want students to synthesize ideas, apply concepts, critically examine something, evaluate something, or analyze something, you need to be clear as to what the task entails. One way to make this clear to yourself is to do an analysis of what you want students to do; that should help you generate and define criteria around which to shape your teaching, assignments, and evaluation.

Defining Your Criteria

Establishing criteria for grading is central to using writing as a pedagogical tool to enhance student learning. Without clear criteria, students will interpret your goals in unexpected ways; that is why extra time taken at the beginning to define your own criteria will save you from getting papers that drift far from your intentions.

For example, if I wanted students to write extended definitions of a term such as child abuse, justice, or friendship, I would expect students to put the term in a class, lay out the criteria for the term, give examples that support the criteria, and list borderline examples that distinguish the term from closely related terms. Examples might be the differences among terms such as hallucinations, illusions, and delusions or firstdegree murder, seconddegree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter.

• As the organizational structure needs to be clear, so too do other criteria.
• Is the issue/problem well focused?
• Is adequate evidence provided to support the argument?
• Does the author preview the problem to provide an overview? (And do you want that in the introduction?)
• Does the student analyze the evidence, or is the evidence simply dumped into the paper?
• Will you require outside references? How many and what kinds?

All these questions that deal with form and content are crucial because they become a kind of map for your students as they work. And later they serve as your map, your criteria for assessing the papers that you get. The more time spent actually figuring out what the writing is supposed to achieve will be rewarded when the papers come in, you get what you had hoped for, and actually enjoy your task of evaluating the work.

Helpful Advice from Colleagues

You also need to be as honest with yourself as possible about what you truly value when you read students' written responses to your assignments. What you value means what will you respond to as you grade, not some ideal way it is supposed to be done.

Gary La Free in the sociology department at Indiana University (in "Establishing Criteria for Grading Student Papers: Moving Beyond Mysticism," Teaching and Learning, Vol. 3, No. 1, December 1977) recommends that teachers actually go through a batch of papers they have graded already and look at those with the same grade to identify commonalties. La Free found that he did "stress such things as whether the author had clearly stated the purpose of the paper, whether statements had been warranted by sufficient evidence, and whether the main arguments were consistent."

He goes on to say: "However, I also found that I had been influenced by other factors that were either irrelevant to my goals in the class or not mentioned to the students as necessary criteria for the paper. I discovered, for example, that the papers with many typing errors and misspelled words were very annoying to me, even though I constantly played down the importance of the paper's form in class. Also, I realized that novelty and originality were counting much more than I had anticipated or advised the class. Finally, I found that in several instances I had made grade decisions more on the basis of what I thought the author could do than on what had actually been done."

After you have worked out a set of criteria that reflect what you value as a reader and what you want as a teacher of your discipline, it is important to write up the writing assignment in detail so that the students will have it to refer to as they work. As Walvoord and McCarthy advise, "Craft the assignment sheet with care," because as they found in their study of undergraduate writing, "students approach the assignment sheet as a recipe and rulebook."

Students will rarely talk to you to get clarification, even if they are unsure of what you want; they will simply follow your guide and hope for the best (B. E. Walvoord and L. P. McCarthy, Thinking and Writing in College: A Naturalistic Study of Students in Four Disciplines, 1990).

Using a Writing Model for Discussion

After establishing your criteria, you may then want to select a model of the kind of writing you have in mind to clarify for students your expectations and the range of possibilities the assignment offers. For example, when I give an extended definition assignment, I usually spend considerable time making sure students understand the criteria I will use to assess their papers, and then I give them examples that show how some writers have approached the same task.

One model I use is Gary Goshgarian's "Zeroing in on Science Fiction" (in W. Horner's Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, 1988) because it nicely illustrates the way criteria can be translated into a fascinating search for meaning and clarity. The Goshgarian essay does not lock students into a rigid form; instead it serves as a lively, readable example of how the criteria that underpin an extended definition can operate in what appears an effortless way. Selecting the models or examples needs to be done with care so that students can see how form and content blend together.

Written Assignments

Obviously, when you write up an assignment for students, you will include a full description of the objectives with criteria delineated and content focus specified.

Here is an example of an assignment that I have given to students.

Read the assigned article and discuss the following items in two or three pages:

1. What is the argument being made in the assigned article? (What is the author arguing for?)

2. Discuss the kind of evidence used to support the argument (i.e., anecdote, personal observation, experimental evidence, statistics, etc.).

3. Discuss the adequacy of the evidence used to support the argument: Is it enough? Is it the right kind?

4. Assess the quality/reasonableness of the overall argument based on your earlier analysis, and explain how the author might have improved the argument by using specific kinds of support/evidence not used or not developed sufficiently in the article. What might the author have done to strengthen his or her argument?

You will also need to lay out due dates and any interventions in the process of How to Create Writing Assignments continuedwriting the paper that you deem useful. Some instructors set a date for students to bring a first draft to class for an inclass revision session.

Revision Guide

I urge you to have students bring their work in progress to class for thoughtful, initial assessment done by their peersnot by you. In order to facilitate inclass revision, you will need to create a revision guide that focuses on criteria you established on your assignment sheet. The revision guide below was designed for a research paper in which students were to draw on evidence from personal experience and research to support a position on a controversial issue. They were expected to deal with oppositional views on the issue and were to document their sources.

1. Read the first three paragraphs, and write one or two sentences that tell what the paper is about, what its focus is.

2. What kinds of evidence does the writer use to support the main focus of the paper? List the kinds of evidence below (i.e., personal experience, quotes from others authorities, statistics, observation, experiment, etc.) that the writer uses.

3. Discuss the adequacy of the evidence in terms of the scope of the paper a narrow focus may not need the kinds of evidence a broader focus or scope might entail.

4. Bracket those places where the writer deals with oppositional views, and then discuss how well the writer deals with the opposition. Also note any oppositional views that the writer may have overlooked.

5. Circle all quotations, facts, and ideas that you believe the author has gotten from others. Draw an arrow to the citation for each. If no citation is given, put a question mark above the circle.

6. When you are finished reading and analyzing the paper, describe how the writer has delivered on the promise made in the opening. Would you like to know more about anything? What questions still bother you at the end? If you are satisfied, what makes you satisfied?

Note that, in the revision guide above, students are asked to write, circle, et, etc. In other words, they are asked to interact with the text by summarizing the focus of the paper and by looking at documentation and showing where the sources are. Avoid open and closed questions that can be answered yes or no.

By asking students to perform certain tasks as they read one another's papers, we reinforce the learning we want and we ask them to commit themselves as thoughtful readers and criticsones who have clear criteria to guide them. Notice that the goals of the assignment are incorporated in the revision guide and serve almost as a mirror of initial expectations.

I essentially plan the revision guide as I plan what I want students to learn from the writing assignment and how it will reinforce the kind of learning I desire. Also, by creating the assignment and listing the focus and criteria for evaluation, I know what I may need to teach about this particular kind of writing or what I may want to focus on in class to ensure that students understand what is expected of them.

In other words, the full writing assignment can often serve as a map of processes, procedures, and sources that I need to incorporate into my teaching.

InClass Revision

Using the revision session as a way to intervene in the writing process helps you get papers that are more thoughtful and considered than you would more than likely get if you simply had students turn in papers without a chance to rethink and examine them with criticism and feedback from classmates. I realize that having a revision session will take time from other class activities, but if writing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. The time taken will pay dividends when you read and assess the papers.

I've found it useful to have students bring three copies of their draft to the inclass revision session. I do that so that students will work in groups of three to assess one another's drafts. In my classes, I put students in groups of three; they give each member a copy of their paper; and then all of them write answers to the brackquestions before they discuss the paper.

Other teachers I know have students exchange papers, take home two or three classmates' papers along with the revision guide, do the initial response at home, and then bring it to class to be discussed by their group. Others simply have students bring their drafts and exchange them with another student who then serves as peer editor. I prefer students to work in threes to give more audience response than they might get if they have only one respondent. Three reviewers ensure richer feedback.

One class period devoted to thoughtful revision reinforces the idea that good writing takes time, thought, and care and can benefit from helpful peer criticism. Professionals frequently turn to peers as they develop ideas, plan research, and write up their results. Collaborative writing from the idea stage to publication is the norm in most organizations.

The illustration at the bottom of the page shows stages in the writing/teaching process that I have outlined above. Note that the traditional sequence usually includes only B, D, and G (shaded boxes; see diagram below).

Conclusion

Taking some class time to foster thoughtful, disciplinecentered writing will give you more focused, better researched, and more considered papers. A growing body of research supports the proposition that writing does increase learning and that writing itself is a way of learning, just as observation, analysis, and criticism are approaches to learning.

The university values writing and stresses its importance by requiring every general education course to have a writing component. As faculty members, we know the importance of writing in our disciplines and in academic advancement and recognition. It is still the primary way we share our research and the knowledge we construct from it. We write because it is central to the mission of a universityto share, discuss, criticize, and use the results of our research.

Taking time with writing in our classes gives our students additional opportuniA Task preplanned by instructor (goals, criteria for evaluation) ties to make sense of what we want them to learn, and it allows them deep engagement in the making of meaning and knowledge. However, if we are to use writing to further our goals as teachers, we need to plan for it carefully, and we need to shape our assignments so that they clearly reflect our goals.

We must construct our assignments so that they invite students not only to learn what our disciplines have to offer, but to craft their own ideas, hear how others react to these ideas, and then reshape their statements. The results should be much more satisfying, even exciting, for us as instructors to read!

New Location for IDP

Hester Hall, Room 203
Phone: 3252323

The Instructional Development Program offices have moved from Carnegie to Hester Hall, Room 203. Our new phone number is 3252323. We hope you will find your way to our new offices (see the map on this page) we are eager to share our services with you.

The following programs and activities are available for all faculty and teaching assistants on the OU campus.

Individual Consulting
The director and his associate are available to discuss any general or specific question on teaching. This interaction may lead to classroom visits, videotaping, etc.

IDEA Course Evaluation
This indepth, diagnostic course evaluation system is available from the Instructional Development Program at no cost to instructors.

TABS Course Evaluation
This evaluation is designed to be used midway through the semester. This timeframe allows teachers to have feedback from students while time remains in the semester to make changes.

Faculty Discussion Groups
Discussion groups start anew each semester and meet every two weeks for lunch and a onehour program on teaching.

TA Training Programs
Before each new academic year, the Instructional Development Program offers a oneweek workshop for international graduate teaching assistants. In addition, a fourday workshop is provided for all TAs.

Professional Development Seminar
Designed for new faculty members, this seminar meets once each week during the fall semester and focuses on the university's organization, support for research, and effective teaching.

Library of Readings on Teaching
Books and articles on almost any aspect of college teaching are available and may be borrowed.

For information, contact L. Dee Fink, director of the Instructional Development Program, at 325-2323