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 ...

Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, ...

Higher-order thinking skills and the ability to integrate technical knowledge with practical applications are vital for employees, especially in today's challenging job market. Can reflective writing ...

In February Howe Writing Across the Curriculum partnered with Howe Writing Center consultants to present a workshop series on Assignment Design, focusing on clarity, audience, and accessibility. Led ...

Many instructors approach assignment design with a "product" focus—that is to say, the choices they make about their assignments (frequency; genre; difficulty; grading scheme; etc.) are oriented ...

Writing is a valuable educational tool for learning. In the classroom, writing can help students grapple with and understand content more deeply and help students learn disciplinary ways of knowing ...

In education–and particularly with my graduate students in higher education–students occasionally focus on the individual points of an assignment rubric instead of stepping back and looking ...

Journals have become a popular format in recent years for courses that require some writing. In-class journal entries can spark discussions and reveal gaps in students' understanding of the material.

Dr. Ann Marie VanDerZanden is preparing students in her horticulture classes for challenging careers by boosting their critical thinking capacity. "Horticulture graduates entering the field of ...