Category: Reviews

An Update on The Writers of Mason Project: By the Numbers

Post author By clarelmoore
Post date October 11, 2017

Since our first interview in February of 2017, we’ve been very busy with the Writers of Mason project. To date, we have interviewed 42 writers, transcribed each of those interviews, and taken 189 profile pictures. We have met and spoken with writers across campus, talking writing in all its messy and awesome glory, with faculty, staff, and students. To date, we have talked with writers from: Fenwick and Johnson Center Libraries, the Students as Scholars/Office of Student Creative Activities and Research offices, Stearns Center, English, Anthropology, B-School, Game Design, Philosophy, Physics, Education, and Mason Korea.

Check in each week as the profiles on our site update.

Tags George Mason University, National Day on Writing, writers of mason, Writing Across the Curriculum

Reviews Teaching Writing

Playing, Learning, and the Teaching Problem by Barbara Fister

Post author By Emily Chambers
Post date February 8, 2017

All learning and no play makes students dull, writes Barbara Fister. Well, not exactly. Instead, she reviews Allison Gopnik’s NYT piece on the learning processes of small children, with possible applications to the classroom. Gopnik describes how young children, who are naturally curious and love exploring and imitating, can perform the same task by imitation as if they are taught that task explicitly, yet when taught explicitly, they lose the opportunity to discover on their own. Fister and Gopnik argue that students are better off learning when they search and discover on their own, creating their own understanding of the world during that process. These discovery processes are richer.

Evaluating Writing Reviews Teaching Writing Technology

Course Workload Estimator by Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence

Post author By Emily Chambers
Post date January 25, 2017

How long does it take students work on coursework assignments? In a recently released resource from the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence, Elizabeth Barre and Justin Esarey created an online calculator of out of class hours students spend on coursework, based on their writing and reading rates.

The online calculator uses various factors of reading and writing assignments to calculate an estimated number of out of class work hours. Researchers Barre and Esarey used several research sources as a foundation and filled in its gaps with their own assumptions. The calculator, nevertheless lets you manually adjust if you disagree with their assumptions. Reading rates are determined by page density, text difficulty, and reading purpose. Reading to survey a text that has no new concepts, students can read about 500 words per minute. But when the purpose is more complex (reading for understanding or engaging with a text), the text difficulty is greater (some or many new concepts), and/or the page density increases, the student’s’ reading rate drops.

Evaluating Writing Reviews Teaching Writing

“I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc…) Papers” by John Warner

Post author By Emily Chambers
Post date November 17, 2016

First year composition courses are often expected to cure students of all their writing woes. John Warner addresses this false assumption by examining why students’ writing often falters outside the first year composition classroom. Not only are students often underprepared and still learning content material, but they do not grasp the requirements of different genres and rhetorical situations. Even when armed with an understanding of rhetorical questions to consider when writing, students often struggle to apply these to a new field of study.

Reviews Teaching Writing

“Professors Can Learn to Be More Effective Instructors” by Coleen Flaherty

Post author By Emily Chambers
Post date November 3, 2016

Coleen Faherty reviews Faculty Development and Student Learning: Assessing the Connections (Indiana University Press), a book based on a multi-year study of faculty development at Washington State and Carleton University. They found that faculty development improves faculty’s teaching and positively influences students’ development. Developing outcomes the faculty believed in was important, the study found, and the improvement to faculty’s teaching persisted over many years, even spreading to others who did not attend the same development.