Rachael Neu

infoneer-pulse:

Students in first-semester composition classes are routinely assigned to write a research paper, but this exercise rarely succeeds because they do not yet grasp how to analyze their sources, say the chief researchers of a multi-institutional study of college students’ citations.

“We need to be teaching analysis, and a lot of it,” Rebecca Moore Howard, professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University and co-principal investigator of the Citation Project, said in an interview. She and her colleague on the project are scheduled to present their latest findings Thursday at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis.

The project, which began as an effort to examine plagiarism and the teaching of writing, looked at source-based student papers from 16 institutions, including Ivy League universities, private and public institutions, liberal-arts colleges, religious institutions, and community colleges.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

(via world-shaker)

I know assessment is often regarded with all the enthusiasm of an impending dental appointment, but this looks like a great “quick & dirty” way to demonstrate library value.

infoneer-pulse:

Is it a given that technology enhances the acts of writing, as it does the arts and sciences of film-making, design, engineering, data collection and analyses, and so forth? What about the teaching and learning of writing?

In a flurry of recent exchanges (subject “Writing horse-shoe-of-horse-heading-east Technology”) on the Writing Program Administration (WPA) listserv, scholars in writing studies have argued these points in some theoretical and practical depth. Maja Wilson, from the University of Maine, sums up the argument nicely: “Steve [Krause, of Eastern Michigan University], and others were arguing that to teach writing, you need to teach the tools available now and not teach or allow the tools on their way out (pen, pencil), because if you aren’t teaching the tools, you aren’t teaching writing. Rich [Haswell, professor emeritus from Texas A&M University], and others argued that, while teaching the use of all those tools can be a good thing, it isn’t necessary to teach writing: writing itself transcends the particular tools, so while teaching the tools can be involved in teaching writing, it isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

» via Inside Higher Ed

world-shaker:

These are pretty simple (which means they’d largely be easy to pull off). Here are two:

Total Physical Response (TPR): Research shows that when physical activity is included in classroom settings, students retain more information. For a quick sitting break, have students stand up and move to one side of the room to indicate their responses to a question. Instead of using this as a right-or-wrong answer activity, this exercise seems best suited for opinion-based responses. Students can see the differing perspectives of their classmates, which then can lead to debate and discussion.

One Word: If it seems a lecture is the only way to discuss a topic, preface it by telling students that at the end of the day’s lesson, they must write down a single word they believe best represents the lesson. Then, they can expand on why they chose that word with a separate paragraph. This will force active listening during the class period, as students will need to be able to condense an entire lesson into the essence of its idea.