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Designing Writing Assignments

Because the rationale behind the Junior-Year course is to provide writing instruction specific to a student’s major, the kinds of writing assignments that are most effective consider specifically what kinds of writing tasks are best suited to one’s discipline and how the writing tasks help students integrate disciplinary content.  Most instructors meet these goals with a mix of informal, short writing assignments and longer, formal assignments.

Formal Assignments

The intent of the Junior-Year course is not to simply have students write but to construct writing experiences that will best foster student learning as future professionals in a particular discipline.  Below are several questions you can ask yourself that will help ensure writing assignments meet the goals of the JYWP and also provide the best learning environment for your students.

What Do I Hope Students Will Learn from the Assignment?

Although many times assignments may have more than one goal, the following categories are useful ones to consider as you design assignments since they suggest different tasks for the students:

• Leaning course content by integrating it with students’ own ideas or extending it to other venues.

• Taking the skills learned in class to do their own independent research.

• Writing to position oneself in professional conversations and begin to take on the voice of an expert.

• Practicing with professional genres, purposes, and/or audiences.

How Should I Write the Assignment Itself to Meet My Goals?

• Center each piece of writing around some question, problem, or issue that provides a reason for writing.  Without a strong sense of exigence (i.e. why the piece of writing matters beyond getting a grade), it is difficult to write effectively.

• Create a rhetorical context for each writing that suggests a purpose for writing, a specific audience, and a role for the writer and audience.

• Provide some guidance in exploring and shaping ideas and presenting them to the reader (e.g. questions to guide their inquiry). Or provide evaluation criteria linked to the important intellectual demands of the task.

• Make a clear connection to content/methodological/analytical knowledge learned in class and the writing task.

How Should I Plan the Various Stages of the Assignment to Get Quality Results?

Scaffolding refers to the process by which a teacher plans the entire course or part of the course with a long, formal assignment in mind.  The lower part of the scaffold provides support and a foundation for the eventual, larger and more central task.  Scaffolding helps students become more successful writers by breaking up the cognitive task of a more complex assignment, allowing feedback and intervention on particular skills and ways of thinking in discrete units, and more clearly help demonstrate the relationship between in-class and out-of-class work.  Here are some tips for scaffolding your writing assignments:

• Practice, when possible, different skills entailed by x sort of writing (e.g., in-class activities practicing analytic skills or interpretative skills).

• Discuss audience expectations and examine models of types of writing you hope they will produce.

• Work smaller assignments into course that will prepare students to think about the content in the ways the assignment requires (e.g., journals, question logs, response papers).

• Break the assignment into sub-topics or “chunks” that will eventually be put together in a more comprehensive format to break down cognitive task and allow for feedback.

How Should I Plan Such a Sequence?

The best way to think about what students will need to be successful is to work backwards from the assignment itself:

• Consider the skills required to produce an assignment (e.g. analysis, summary, synthesis, case study methodology, etc.).

• Consider what content knowledge students must understand before they can say something of their own about it or apply that knowledge to a new situation.

• Work smaller assignments into the course that will prepare students to think in the ways the assignment requires and have access to the materials and content they need to complete assignment.

What Kinds of Scaffolding Might I Consider?

• Informal writing assignments sequenced throughout the semester or part of the semester.

• Prewriting tasks that help student think through the paper assignment before they begin drafting.

• Staging the assignment itself into sub-topics or “chunks” that will eventually be put together.

• More formal, short assignments that help build knowledge and skill for larger assignments sequenced throughout the semester.

How Should I Plan the Assignment to Allow Opportunities for Feedback?

• Solicit feedback right from the beginning to help clarify and get a sense of how students interpret the assignment.  This can be done easily in discussion or through a short, ungraded response asking them to explain the assignment in their own words.

• Be flexible and willing to let students revise when necessary.  Many instructors include due dates for first and second drafts to help this process along and use class time or homework for peer feedback to the drafts.

• Include feedback while drafting or ask for proposals or progress reports so that you can intervene as the work progresses.

Updated September 3, 2008

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