Constructing an assignment that elicits good writing may be as difficult for teachers as writing the essays is for students, a forthcoming study suggests. Teachers must strike a delicate balance ...

Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

The first thing you need to do to write better online class assignments is to understand what is being asked. Once you get the hang of it, follow the instructions and the proper assignment writing ...

The Writing Center's consultants strive to help students understand and engage with writing assignments in productive ways. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter assignment sheets that are difficult ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...

Teachers often worry about the advantages and disadvantages of providing students with a rubric for writing assignments. After all, providing a checklist rubric can result in students who write to ...

I’ve always found that getting into the heads of your students is one of the best ways to learn what they bring with them into the classroom. In today’s stressful, standardized testing-based culture, ...

AP and NWP teachers participating in the survey report giving students written assignments ranging from research papers to short responses, journaling, and creative writing. The type and frequency of ...