How exactly does this assignment fit with the objectives of your course? Should this assignment relate only to the class and the texts for the class, or should it also relate to the world beyond the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Howe Writing Across the Curriculum recently partnered with consultants in the Howe Writing Center to present a series of workshops on Assignment Design, featuring real-time feedback from our student ...

There is no doubt that writing is an absolutely essential skill to successfully pass through the college and perhaps through our entire lives. Nevertheless, a recent National Assessment of Educational ...

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a ...