Category: Assignment Design

While writing specialists broadly understand that writing helps students learn, we also advocate for writing assignments that prompt students to think rhetorically: how writers use texts to convey meaning appropriate to an audience in a given context.  As a part of this conversation, writing specialists talk about the importance of audience, but research in writing studies, including here at Mason, reveals that college writing assignments do not commonly address an audience beyond the instructor, who typically is addressed as an evaluator. 

It recently occurred to us that, while we have been sharing resources about designing assignments this semester, we haven’t actually shared any samples of designs.  These resources are helpful when considering how to design our assignments, but they don’t show us how to communicate that assignment through a prompt sheet.  So, they compel us to ask: what does a good assignment sheet actually look like?

This semester, WAC Mason has been thinking about and studying the ways in which faculty design writing assignments.  While it seems common for instructors to think about the content of writing assignments, we sometimes forget to talk about the process of writing assignments: how do we develop them?  What should we consider as we develop them? 

As many instructors know, it can be difficult to know how well-developed a writing assignment is, how clearly the prompt is written, and how students will respond to the project, especially when the assignment is brand new.  Soliciting feedback from colleagues, writing specialists, or students can be an effective method of developing prompts, but instructors aren’t always able to take advantage of that opportunity. 

Developing good writing assignments is a complicated task, one not simplified by the multiple ways in which students sometimes interpret them.  Instructors often find themselves asking: Are my instructions clear?  Do they align with the course’s learning objectives?  And perhaps most important, will my students find this project engaging?  Michelle Eodice, Anne Ellen Geller, and Neal Lerner can’t provide the answers to all of these questions, but their research is helping us to understand what a “meaningful” writing assignment might be for students.