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SafeAssign: Expose the Writing and Thinking Challenges

 

In order to design a good assignment, instructors need to consider not only the end goal of the paper product, but also the process, especially the thinking process, that students must undergo to see the assignment to fruition. However, many assignments are heavily weighted toward the final product and give little attention to what students must actually do in order to be successful. Consider, for example, this assignment:

Write a 15-20 page research paper (typed, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins). Your paper should discuss in more depth a topic covered briefly in one of the chapters. Cite at least five sources, using APA documentation format. The paper is due the last day of class and is worth 30% of the course grade.

As this example illustrates, many assignments describe what a final product will look like (in other words, what it is) rather than detailing how the student might go about managing the assignment and why she is being asked to do it in the first place. Of course, all writing assignments must have product goals, but they should also have clear process and learning goals. Thus, the most successful assignments are ones in which the instructor has attended to each of these things, assignments that reflect:

• The what: The product, explaining what the writing should “look like.”
• The how: The process, explaining methods for achieving product goals.
• The why: The rationale, explaining how the assignment connects to particular learning goals for the course.

These categories can provide an overall assignment design template that can help translate instructor objectives for final products into student-friendly guidelines for accomplishing the task.

 

The Problems with Open-Ended Assignments

It takes time and forethought to develop a writing assignment that attends to the thinking and writing process of the student and clearly reflects the learning goals of the course as well. Weighed down by a host of competing demands, many instructors opt for broad and open-ended assignments that seem to allow students both range and flexibility.

 

For students, however, open-ended assignments, assignments that provide too many choices or too broad a topic, offer the most potential for both intentional and unintentional plagiarism. A student will have pretty good luck, for instance, finding a paper online (or parts of a paper) that satisfies the general requirements. Further, with a loosely-defined assignment, it becomes easier to throw together a collection of quotations and ideas (whether documented correctly or not) from other sources in the hopes of hitting the right mark.

 

Many professors favor the open-ended assignment because they want to give students a choice in topic and a chance to work on something meaningful to them. These are admirable goals, but the truth is that students generally don’t know how to interpret “what the teacher wants” from overly open-ended assignments like the one in the preceding section. As writing specialist Mark Waldo discusses in Demythologizing Language Difference in the Academy, the open-ended assignment leaves students with too many questions about what approach to take with the paper. As he notes:

When students do not know what the instructor expects from the assignment, their first thinking strategy is trying to figure out what he or she wants. As a second strategy, they ‘cover all the bases,’ writing about everything in an effort to hit on something acceptable. The third [strategy] is to rely too much on their sources, too little on themselves, because sources feel safer than the expression and support of their own ideas. (105)

Because students are generally trying to do what we ask them to do, the quality of their work results in part from the rationales we give, the contexts we create, and the guidance we provide. For most undergraduate students, the more open the assignment, the more likely they are to become uncertain, unfocused, and unmoored. This is particularly true at the 100 and 200 course level. Students at this level often feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that they do not have the authority to write sufficiently well on a topic. This lack of confidence can lead inexperienced writers to reach too broadly in order to “have enough to say” and can easily turn into an overreliance on sources to do the writing and thinking for them. By the time they are juniors and seniors, students are generally more prepared to take on the challenges of an open-ended assignment; however, all students can benefit from more carefully constructed assignments that help them focus their attention. Thus, we can reduce the possibility for plagiarism in both the short and long term by creating closed rather than open assignments, assignments that are contained, specific, current, and process-oriented.

 

References:

 

Waldo, Mark L. Demythologizing Language Difference in the Academy: Establishing Discipline-Based Writing Programs. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2004.

 

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Also in this section:

• Characteristics of Effective Assignments
• Designing Effective Assignments
  • Expose the Writing and Thinking Challenges
  • The Value of a "Closed System"