Craft Great Writing Assignments

Before we design a writing assignment, we need to have a clear sense of where our course is aiming our students, typically expressed in a set of course goals. We should use these goals to help us clarify what students will learn from the assignment and how that learning relates to larger goals. Connecting assignment and course goals helps us integrate our major writing assignments into a larger sequence of ongoing work that focuses and directs students’ thinking. 

After we have clarified for ourselves how the assignment connects to our goals, we also need to help students see why the work they are doing matters by explaining this connection to them (in writing!). Describing the goals of the writing assignment and the connection to the course goals gives meaning and purpose to the work students do because it helps them see how assignments are important to their success in the course and beyond. (Winkelmes 2013).

When we have a clear sense of where we are aiming students in an assignment, we are ready to zero in on the specific disciplinary thinking skills we want students to use in the assignment.

Much of the writing that students have traditionally done in school was designed for them to show what they know instead of using what they know to respond to authentic problems or situations. As a result, students’ prior experiences with writing in our disciplines have often been superficial and inauthentic - a performance rather than a learning experience.

A different approach to assignment design is to give students meaning-constructing tasks, which ask them to use critical thinking to respond to meaningful disciplinary challenges. Meaning-constructing tasks present disciplinary problems within a context that gives students a role or purpose, a targeted audience, and a form or genre to write in (Bean, 2011).

In short, these kinds of assignments ask our students to do what we actually do in our own work: take positions, make arguments, pose questions, propose solutions, and communicate our thinking about disciplinary issues to an audience that shares our interest in these issues.

In addition to helping engage students more effectively in the writing process, research shows that more authentic, problem-centered assignments lead to greater student learning than traditional pseudo-academic assignments like term papers (Winkelmes, 2016). Assignments that require higher-order disciplinary thinking have the added effect of inviting students into a community of scholars in our field.

When students do poorly on assignments, it’s often because they haven’t spent enough time throughout the course doing the kind of work the assignment requires. For example, if they have spent the majority of the semester listening to lectures that describe disciplinary concepts and taking tests that merely assess their basic understanding, they will struggle on a writing assignment that requires them to apply concepts - because they haven’t had the practice or preparation they need to do this work.

Practice doesn’t mean just having students “do things,” though: before we can design real practice, we need to articulate the kind of thinking that the assignment requires them to do. After we have designed a meaning-constructing task that asks students to do authentic disciplinary thinking, we need to step back and ask ourselves exactly what is required of our students.

This means considering not only what students need to know, but also identifying the skills they will need to use to complete the assignment successfully. Conducting a thorough skills analysis helps us design the formative work that will give students opportunities to practice those skills multiple times before the assignment is due.

A skills analysis often shows us that an assignment we initially considered to be fairly straightforward is actually quite complex and requires significant sophistication on the part of our students. Coming to this realization during the assignment design process is vital to helping us begin to plan the day-to-day work we will assign in our course so that we can help students prepare to complete the assignment successfully.

Students need multiple opportunities to receive feedback on the development of their writing and thinking while they are working on assignments, not only on final drafts.

We often think that having students submit full rough drafts is the most effective way to give them feedback, but often that feedback comes too late in the writing process and the problems that emerge can’t feasibly be handled in such a short time. In addition, when we don’t have students do substantial work on assignments early on, they will often “binge write” and produce large chunks of text at one time.

Not only does this practice lead to writing that isn’t carefully thought through, it also deprives students of the opportunity for frequent writing practice and feedback.

A more productive approach is to ask students to practice writing frequently and tackle assignments in small chunks. Cross-disciplinary research in Writing Across the Curriculum suggests that short, frequent writing exercises can produce substantial improvement in students’ understanding of disciplinary concepts and in the clarity of their writing (Bazerman et al., 2005). In addition to providing practice, these small assignments provide students the opportunity to receive your feedback early on, when they still have significant time to consider and act on it. 

The skills analysis described above can inform our decisions about the kinds of small steps students can take that will allow them to receive feedback on their development of the essential skills required for success on the assignment. Moreover, the practice students do should include having them make iterative attempts at elements of the assignment so that you can respond to those attempts.