What Students Write

By Colleen Flaherty. Professors sometimes bemoan their students' writing skills. But how good are professors at creating quality writing assignments? There's no recent, national study of how and what professors are asking their students to write, despite lots of research suggesting that rich, varied writing assignments and opportunities for feedback mean better student papers. A new book seeks to fill that data void, and argues that what professors are asking their students to write is as important as what students end up writing.
“Writing assignments are revealing classroom artifacts,” says Dan Melzer, reading and writing coordinator at California State University at Sacramento in his book, Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (Utah State University Press). Read more...