From traditional essay to 'Ready Steady Cook' presentation: Reasons for innovative changes in assignments

The prose essay, case study and laboratory report, composed by individual students in isolation from their peers, used to be the mainstay of undergraduate writing. However, in recent years an array of alternative assignment types such as blogs, letters and e-posters have widened the repertoire of texts expected. This article attempts to describe the reasoning behind changes in assignment types at undergraduate and master’s level at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Data from 58 semi-structured interviews with lecturers in three UK universities is used together with course handbooks and some clarifications with lecturers via email. Suggested reasons for new assignment types are grouped into three categories: external, lecturer-driven and student-driven. The article surmises that, because of these pressures, students are now expected to produce a wide variety of text types, and greater attention should be paid to guidance in new assignments for both native and non-native speaker students

Writing for different disciplines

About the book: Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher education lecturers and tutors teach writing to their students. Containing a range of diverse teaching strategies, the book offers both practical activities to help students develop their writing abilities and guidelines to help lecturers and tutors think in more depth about the assessment tasks they set and the feedback they give to students. The authors explore a wide variety of text types, from essays and reflective diaries to research projects and laboratory reports. The book draws on recent research in the fields of academic literacy, second language learning, and linguistics. It is grounded in recent developments such as the increasing diversity of the student body, the use of the Internet, electronic tuition, and issues related to distance learning in an era of increasing globalisation

Hiding in Plain Sight: Identifying Computational Thinking in the Ontario Elementary School Curriculum

Given a growing digital economy with complex problems, demands are being made for education to address computational thinking (CT) – an approach to problem solving that draws on the tenets of computer science. We conducted a comprehensive content analysis of the Ontario elementary school curriculum documents for 44 CT-related terms to examine the extent to which CT may already be considered within the curriculum. The quantitative analysis strategy provided frequencies of terms, and a qualitative analysis provided information about how and where terms were being used. As predicted, results showed that while CT terms appeared mostly in Mathematics, and concepts and perspectives were more frequently cited than practices, related terms appeared across almost all disciplines and grades. Findings suggest that CT is already a relevant consideration for educators in terms of concepts and perspectives; however, CT practices should be more widely incorporated to promote 21st century skills across disciplines. Future research would benefit from continued examination of the implementation and assessment of CT and its related concepts, practices, and perspectives

RECAP Series Paper 30. The CEM Model: developing an operational model and strategic framework to support the in-sessional delivery of academic literacy to international students

This guide documents the background, research and preliminary findings relating to a key area emerging in Higher Education institutions in the UK

Exploring the Academic/Creative Writing Binary

I began to work on this study in my ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines class during my junior year at Pace University. After being asked to write a paper on what writing looks like in my discipline, I realized that my perceptions of the kinds of writing done by faculty and students in a university English department were limited and constricting as a result of the binary way in which I viewed academic and creative forms of writing. For instance, I had trouble believing that my creative writing professor studied pre-med in undergrad. I continued my research on this topic by developing a study to discover how faculty and undergraduates think about writing in an English department. In conducting this research, I hoped to redefine and illustrate potential overlaps between academic and creative writing and to propose new (perhaps more fluid or capacious) ways of labeling and conveying the kind of writing students and faculty produce. Specifically, I wanted to explore whether these are terms or categories that either groups use, or whether faculty and students’ perceptions of academic and creative writing challenge these categories. I explored these concepts through a qualitative study. After obtaining IRB approval, I devoted one class of Meaghan Brewer’s English 201:Writing in the Discplines to a workshop where students in the class brought in samples of their own writing and then put them into categories and created labels. Students filled out a form giving a rationale for how they labeled different kinds of writing before having a class discussion. I repeated the same process in a composition faculty meeting in the English department. These activities are modeled on activities described in research by composition scholar Anne Ruggles Gere. This highly contextual, qualitative research is commonplace in composition studies and has been present in the majority of my initial literature review. In conducting this study, my largest obstacle was the small amount of time I had to analyze the results of my activities between drafts. However, the data collected exceeded my expectations in that, like in much of the research cited in this paper, I found students had binary views of academic and creative writing despite not using them often as labels. For the most part, they described academic as being constricting and reliant on structure whereas they saw creative as a freer style that allowed them to voice an opinion. On the contrary, faculty used these terms more frequently, but thought about them in less binary ways. After having a group discussion, both faculty and students appeared to have broadened the way they looked at writing which is what I was hoping to encourage with this study. My findings suggest that faculty members need to create curricula that encourage students to see genres in more complex ways. Future research might explore how expanding the approach to teaching genre could redefine student perceptions of college writing