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WRITING TO LEARN
A Short Course Given in Spring, 2004
By Barbara Bretcko
Professor of English
CAITL Fellow
PART 2: Low Stakes Writing to Produce Better Research Papers
1. What is the difference between High Stakes and Low Stakes writing?
2. Why should your students write a research paper?
3. What did they learn about writing research papers in freshman English?
4. When you teach the research paper, what do you have to teach?
5. What Low Stakes writing tasks can help students write better research papers?
6. What can you do besides Low Stakes writings to prompt better research papers?
7. What are some of the ways you can respond to a research paper?
8. What can you do to prevent plagiarism? (And a short annotated bibliography on plagiarism.)
PART 1: Low Stakes Writing to Produce Better Performance on Tests
1. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW STAKES WRITING?
High Stakes Writing is Writing to Demonstrate Learning: This is the kind of writing most of us think of as “college writing.”
• Its object is to allow the student to show you what she knows.
• It is expected to follow the conventions of formal academic prose and may be expected to follow additional, discipline-specific conventions as well.
• It can be written in or out of class.
• It is expected to be error free when written outside of class.
• It consists of essay tests, out of class essays, research papers and projects, book reports, lab reports, analyses of case studies etc.
• It is graded.
Low Stakes Writing is Writing to Learn: This is the kind of writing I’m arguing for.
• Its object is to simulate thought, generate ideas and connections, keep students engaged and thinking during class, and/or give us information about our students.
• It is usually short and informal.
• It can be written in or out of class.
• It can consist of myriad tasks from one-word responses to short essays.
• Although it is messy, it is never corrected.
• Although you may give credit for it, it is never graded.
2. WHY SHOULD YOUR STUDENTS WRITE A RESEARCH PAPER?
If you’ve never asked yourself this question before or if you think the answer is completely obvious, now is the time to focus on your goals for this particular project. Students don’t like doing research papers and you probably don’t like reading them, so before you go down this road make sure it’s leading somewhere important. Once you know your destination, you can be clearer about how your students can get there.
Begin by listing your goals for this project. Common goals include these:
• To give students practice in doing research in your discipline.
• To hone specific research skills. (e.g. finding primary sources, becoming familiar with important journals, following a research thread, learning to use the format that is standard in your discipline)
• To give them practice at formulating a good research question and articulating an informed answer to it.
• To teach them to evaluate sources.
• To hone skills in reading and summarizing.
• To teach them how to deal with the huge mass of material that confronts the modern researcher.
• To give them practice at collaborative research.
• To give students who are majoring in your discipline practice at doing one kind of writing that will be required of them in graduate school and/or as practitioners in your field.
• To give them practice at developing the writing style expected in your discipline.
• To give them necessary experience in writing a long paper. (Why is it a necessary experience? Explain your reasoning to your students.)
You may have other goals, too. Note that the list does not include “Because I had to write research papers when I was an undergraduate.”
Once you’ve decided on your goals, you can construct an assignment that is designed to meet them and give your students the kind of guidance they will require.
3. WHAT DID THEY LEARN ABOUT WRITING RESEARCH PAPERS IN FRESHMAN ENGLISH?
• You can expect a student who has taken English I and II before taking your class to have written two research papers. Some will have written more, but most RVCC instructors assign one in English I and one in English II. However, the assignments will vary widely as will the requirements. Just about the only things you can be sure that your student will have been taught are how to use the MLA format and what constitutes plagiarism. You can almost be sure that most of them will tell you that they don’t know which format they used and that their teachers told them they only had to cite direct quotations.
Students have an innate resistance to this process, especially to citing sources. They come to freshman English swearing that no one in high school taught them to cite sources (a statement that would alarm their high school teachers but probably not surprise them). I have surveyed English II students on the first day of class, asking them what they wrote their English I research paper about, and had my own students—those who took English I with me—report that they hadn’t had to write one, or that they don’t remember what it was about. This is especially common for those of us who assign something other than the most traditional research paper.
• But apart from the formal “research paper,” students who take English I and II at RVCC (and some of your students will have taken one or both of these courses elsewhere) have done a lot of papers that require citation. This is not the same as “research papers,” but it means they’ve had a good bit of practice at the mechanics of when and how to cite a source. While at one time English I teachers (and even some of English II) required students to write about their personal experience, the movement has been toward teaching close reading and analysis of other people’s writing. Students commonly read pairs or sets of texts and write comparative essays. Not all those who teach English I teach this way, but it is most likely what your students have experienced.
• Even those who remember how to cite and when to cite will know how to cite in the Modern Language Association format. If you want APA, Chicago, Turabian or anything but MLA, you will have to be clear about that and either teach it yourself or guide your students to online sources, then be prepared to answer some questions in class. You probably won’t have to spend a lot of time on it and may only have to spend a few minutes in a few classes answering questions, but you won’t be able to assume that they can automatically apply what they learned about MLA to APA. I can’t tell you why this is hard stuff to learn, but I can report that even the best students have a rough time with it.
• Most students who have taken English II will have written English papers. The most common form of English II uses literature as the topic for writing. Although some instructors give cross-disciplinary research assignments, most students who have written research papers in English II class have written them about literature.
• What you absolutely can expect of students who have taken English I at RVCC (and especially those who’ve also completed English II) is that they have had a lot of experience with examining a text. They have read texts (essays in English I and sometimes in English II; the latter most frequently focuses on literature) and been required to draw conclusions that can be supported by direct reference to the author’s words. In other words, their critical reading skills should be pretty good and they should be able to compare and contrast texts in meaningful ways.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly in terms of your expectations of your students: They may be taking English I or II at the same time that they are taking your course. Or they may not even have taken English I yet. In fact, if they have declared themselves to be non-degree-seeking (i.e. just taking a course) they may not even have taken the reading and writing placement tests.
Keep all of this in mind when you are constructing your assignment.
4. WHEN YOU TEACH THE RESEARCH PAPER, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO TEACH?
You have to teach your students the following:
How to do research in your discipline
• Which are the best data bases?
• Which are the highly regarded journals?
• What are the conventions of writing in your discipline? Your students probably have not been taught how to write for science, math, sociology or philosophy. You cannot assume they have written a book review, critiqued an art show or written a lab report before.
• Which is the standard citation format in your area? (Remember, English uses MLA and my students continue to have trouble with it—even when they are required to cite sources in most of my English I and every one of my English II assignments.)
How to organize and format this paper
• Should they begin with an abstract? Background material? A formulation of the question? Can they begin any way they like?
• Do they need to do a review of their literature search? If so, assume they’ve never done this before and give instruction.
• Can they use section headings (like their text book) or do they have to produce an essay that uses transition between sections?
How to manage their time
Consider establishing due dates for the following:
• Topic approval. Don’t let them change topics after this date. Do this for two reasons. First, most student writers decide that their topic is bad at some point. If they change their topic they are just as likely to hit the same wall with the new one. Second, it helps curb plagiarism. (See below.)
• Submitting a preliminary bibliography. This way you can encourage them to be doing the research and you can check to see if they are actually finding appropriate sources. If they aren’t you (and they) find out before it’s too late.
• Submitting a (more or less) final bibliography. This draws a line on the research and helps to forestall the student who happily spends 7/8’s of the assignment’s timeline doing research on the net.
• A rough statement of the main point they think their paper will make. (In most English writing classes we refer to this as the thesis.)
• A first rough draft. You don’t even have to read it, just thumb through the pages and see that the required number have been handed in.
• A date for an in-class peer review session. Even 15 minutes will be enough to prompt most of them to get a draft done on time.
Finally, give substantial credit for timeliness. Some instructors make completing all the steps on time part of the paper grade, and some make it part of the class participation grade. Having timeliness count as part of your grading system is justified: They are learning how to do a long project and part of that learning process is time management.
5. WHAT LOW STAKES WRITING TASKS CAN HELP STUDENTS WRITE BETTER RESEARCH PAPERS?
Giving over 5-10 minutes to a writing task once a week while your students are working on their research projects can keep them on their toes and keep you up to date on what is going well, what is going poorly, and for whom.
Choosing a topic
• Begin by spending some class time generating topics. They can start in pairs and report out, or you can do this as a whole-class exercise. Once you have some topics on the board, ask them to each choose three that they might like to investigate. Then have them write for two or three minutes about why they are interested in each.
• Once they’ve chosen, ask them to write for five minutes on what they already know about the topic, what they think they are going to find when they do research, or why this topic interests them.
• Ask them to find a connection between their topic and their own experience, no matter how remote. Finding even a modest or off-beat link between what they are researching and what they have lived can give added verve to the research task.
As they do their research
• Once a week, have them report on how their research is going. Instead of asking “How’s it going?” you might try one of the following prompts:
-- What’s the best source you’ve located so far and why is it good?
-- What is something surprising you’ve found? (or interesting, absurd, unusual, funny, puzzling, unexpected)
-- Describe a problem you’re having with your research.
-- Describe a point of disagreement you’ve encountered.
-- Compare two different sources on the same topic.
-- Write a letter to the author of one of your sources. It can be a fan letter, hate mail, or something in between.
While they are in the writing stage
• Write a question, the answer to which is your paper. (Helps them focus.)
• Explain your topic so smart 10 year old could understand it.
• Explain your topic to someone else in class. Record any questions the person has about it.
• Write me a letter about how your research is going so far.
• Draw a concept map of your paper.
• Tell your research paper as a story that begins “Once upon a time.”
• Draw a picture or map of your paper.
• A week or so before the final product is due, ask them to write in class about how they are feeling. This can give them a chance to express their feelings of frustration, stress or panic. It may lead some of them to make an appointment to see you for help or go to the Writing Center.
• Either just before or just after the first rough draft is due, ask them to study their notes for their paper before class, then give them 20 minutes to summarize their paper. This is an excellent exercise that leads quite a few students to realize that they do, indeed, know what they want to say. Or that they thought they knew, but. . . .
6. WHAT CAN YOU DO BESIDES LOW STAKES WRITINGS TO PROMPT BETTER RESEARCH PAPERS?
Always give the assignment in writing.
• List requirements including length, number of sources, kinds of sources.
• Make a clear statement about what constitutes plagiarism and what will happen if you catch them plagiarizing. (See the section on plagiarism below.)
• List your goals for the assignment. (See above.) Students are frequently quite interested in our pedagogy. Learning that you are putting them through the rigors of research and researched writing for a set of reasons can be motivating.
• List a set of due dates. (See above.)
Teach them specifically how to do research in your discipline.
• Take them to the library for a bibliographic instruction session with one of the librarians. If you give him or her your assignment, the session can be tailored to it.
• Consider a follow-up bib session in the bib instruction room, after they have been researching for a week or two. This gives them a chance to ask specific questions about problems they are having. The session can be scheduled with the same librarian or you can do it yourself.
• Ask the librarian to construct a session that allows sufficient time for your students to do an application exercise right there in the bib instruction lab.
• Point your students toward the best data bases and most significant publications in your field.
Provide Models of Good Papers
Finding models takes time. If you can, this is a project you can work on with another colleague or even with your entire department.
Good: One “A” paper, preferably a more standard “A” (as opposed to the best paper anyone ever wrote for you, which can be more depressing and intimidating than helpful).
Better: Two “A” papers, each taking a different approach. Or one “A” and one “C” paper.
Best: A group of 3-5 papers for students to rank and explain their ranking. This can be done individually as homework, in class as a small group task, or in a combination exercise where students do the work at home and compare their responses in small groups. After they explain their rankings and reasons, you tell them how you rank the papers and why. (It’s worth the time it takes.)
Remind them that technology can help
Students can have their Works Cited page (the MLA term for the reference list at the end of the paper) formatted automatically in either MLA or APA style through either <easybib.com> or <noodletool.com> both of which charge a very modest fee. There is software available that will format entire documents in APA or MLA style, but at $35-$45 per style, most students will probably find it too expensive. EasyBib and NoodleTool, however, are especially helpful these days, when the rules for formatting electronic sources seem to change just a bit every year.
Remind them that human beings can help, too.
Give your students one of the handouts from the Writing Center and remind them that there are tutors who can help them. Give the Writing Center a copy of your assignment, too. They’ll keep it on file for the student who comes in but forgets to bring the assignment sheet.
Remember that RVCC’s librarians will tailor bibliographic instruction sessions to your discipline and even to your specific assignment. Even if you don’t take the entire class for a bib instruction session, letting your library liaison know what your assignment is (and sending a copy of your written materials) can be helpful for students who have trouble with their research in the library.
The Library’s web page is an extremely helpful resource both for citation and for research. Students click on “Subject Guides” on the Library’s home page, and they find both the MLA and APA guides in short form.
Create a Grading Rubric in Advance and Hand It Out With the Assignment.
Knowing from the start how their final paper will be evaluated is immensely helpful to students. Telling them from the start is helpful to you. (www.rubistar.com will provide rubrics your can copy or walk you through designing your own.)
Stress Your Expectation that the Final Paper Will Be Error-Free from the Start.
You have the right to expect error-free writing on High Stakes assignments, even if you don’t teach writing. As Peter Elbow points out, you don’t flinch at demanding typed papers even though you don’t teach word processing. And saying that you expect error-free prose doesn’t obligate you to correcting all those errors. (See Responding to High Stakes Writing.)
-- State it in your assignment sheet.
-- Remind students to use a spelling checker often, as they write as well as for the final product. (While you’re at it, remind them to save their work every 15 minutes as they write and to back up all their work, too.)
-- Remind them that there are writing tutors to help them find errors.
-- Urge them to get multiple proofreaders for their final draft.
Do the Assignment Yourself
You don’t have to write the paper, but it’s revealing to spend a few hours doing research. You should try to answer these questions:
• Are the kinds and numbers of sources you are demanding available through RVCC’s library? If students are going to require interlibrary loan to get the materials, be aware that that could be a big barrier to success.
• Can you easily find enough sources of the quality you demand? If you can’t find them easily, be prepared to teach students how to find them.
• Are you feeling overwhelmed by too much information? If so, be prepared to help them narrow their search.
• After 2 hours, can you write a good general outline of a paper that would use only the sources you’ve found so far?
If you can do all of that in an evening, they can reasonably expected to do all of that in the weeks or months you’ll give them to do your project.
A Few Words About Book Reports
The book report seems like such a simple assignment. They only have to read one book and don’t have any research to do. Why is this kind of writing done so poorly so often?
Because for someone with little or no background in your discipline, evaluating a book can be overwhelming. Think about the book reviewers you are familiar with. They’re all experts. They have read other books by the author they are reviewing and have read so widely in the field that they can compare this book to others on the topic. We can’t expect this from students.
Ironically, having students read a little more can give them a more manageable task. Ask them to read the book and two reviews of it. Then write an essay comparing the reviews and evaluating them: Which reviewer does the student think gives the most accurate evaluation?
Another version of that assignment is to assign a book and a short reading by the same author and ask students to compare them.
The central point is to provide your students with contrasting texts to evaluate. You’ll get better results.
7. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WAYS YOU CAN RESPOND TO A RESEARCH PAPER?
Assigning High Stakes writing doesn’t commit you to writing as much on the student’s essay as the student wrote. Writing too much is fruitless. A waste of time. Don’t get caught in that trap.
Instead, try these ways of responding:
• Use a rubric. Hand it out with your assignment. Write only a comment at the end with your grade.
• Correct writing errors that trouble you for one or two pages and no more. Draw a line and write “I stopped correcting here.” (Once your students know what the line means, you don’t have to write the sentence.)
• Look for places where things go right and note them.
• Make a maximum of three criticisms, three statements intended to point out error of any sort. (Think about it: How much more could you take?)
• Try to respond as a reader rather than as a “corrector.”
Sample responses:
“I enjoyed reading this.”
“I can see this clearly—great description.”
“Good summary of a complex task/text/story/process/etc.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“I disagree, but I also see your point.”
“Vivid quote—good choice.”
“This made me laugh—thanks.”
“Your voice is clear/thoughtful/articulate/professional/etc.”
Not all responses are positive:
“You’re losing me here.”
“I had to read this sentence (paragraph/section) twice to understand it.”
“I’m having trouble following your argument.”
“This says __________________. Is that what you mean?”
“These kinds of errors give the impression of haste.”
“It’s sounding more and more like you wrote this at 3am the morning it was due.”
“The image of ____________ on page 3 was powerful/ shocking/ vivid/ thought-provoking/ surprising/ lovely/ interesting/ unexpected/ lucid/ classic/ beautiful/ overwhelming/ so clear/ alarming/ etc.
What’s the nicest thing a teacher ever wrote on one of your papers? Say that to a student every now and then. (That’s where “I enjoyed reading this” came from. I realized it was high praise from a teacher who’d had to read a stack of papers.)
Never write any of the awful things you remember teachers having written on your work.
Consider writing a single, longer comment at the end of the paper. This can be word processed or hand written. If I write a long comment, I address the student by name and sign with my initials.
8. WHAT CAN YOU DO TO TRY TO PREVENT PLAGIARISM?
Note the qualifier—you can try to avoid plagiarism. Nothing is foolproof or can forestall every larcenous impulse. But some things can make it a lot harder to steal or buy a paper outright.
• Establish a series of due dates for topic choice, preliminary bibliography, preliminary thesis, a complete draft of one section of the paper, a complete rough draft. Provide substantial credit for completing the steps on time.
• Establish a topic approval date. Once you’ve approved a topic—which means you know it’s doable both in terms of scope and availability of resources—it cannot be changed. Many decisions to plagiarize are made at the very last minute and you make it harder to buy a paper if it has to be an a very specific topic.
• Use the group research/individual paper model. You can form research groups by topic and assign the group to come up with a number of resources—10, say—that the entire group has to use. No outside sources (or limit it to one or two). The group hands in a copy of each source along with copies of their papers.
• Have the entire class do research, everyone submitting X number of sources from which you choose a limited number. Students may use only these sources.
• Require some idiosyncratic research in addition to the usual book, journal and internet sources. Require the use of your textbook (or the author of your textbook) as one source. A personal interview, use of a film, an observation of some sort, original data collection, use of a primary source or a government source—any of these make it harder to plagiarize an entire paper.
• Ask students to establish a personal connection to the research topic. If personal experience isn’t anathema to you, this is a way that avoids plagiarism and also can provoke a deeper understanding of the topic. A relatively easy way to do this is to require that the essay be “bookended” by the author’s personal experience with some aspect of the topic.
• If you are more concerned with teaching research skills than long paper writing, have students write their paper about their research, describing their process and evaluating a given number of sources for their usefulness on the topic.
A Word About the Kinds of Plagiarism
Although I encounter an occasional hard-liner who will fail a student for what is pretty obviously unintentional plagiarism, most of us realize that there are levels of criminal intent.
Here are mine:
• Criminal: The paper is obviously not the student’s work. It has been written for her, bought by him, or lifted without the writer’s knowledge. If the student has lifted someone’s work from the Internet, you can sometimes catch that through a Google search or one of the plagiarism tools. But if a student has a friend or relative write for them, the computer is no help. When I’ve managed to prove this it has most often been by quizzing a student on content. Use of vocabulary obviously beyond the writer’s scope is the easiest of these sorts of quizzes: “On page three you describe the tone of the writing as ‘querulous.’ What did you mean?” RVCC requires that this breach be reported to the administration. It is my choice to fail the student in the course, not just the paper. After all, some students write their own papers and get F’s. Stealing one should carry an additional penalty.
• Scofflaw: The student seems to know when to cite because he cites both quoted and “reworded” passages. Yet he doesn’t cite nearly enough. (Or he cites only quotes.) This gets a penalty of at least one letter grade. Really bad cases get an “F” but can earn a “C” if the student will go back in and insert the appropriate citations. Again, my intent is to reward careful citation the first time around, not give a good grade to a careless writer who has me point out all her mistakes so she can correct them.
• Innocent by Reason of Good Will: The student cites correctly but not often enough or the student cites enough but the format is confusing. There is also an interesting phenomenon that occurs in most serious student writers when they unconsciously imitate the writers they have been reading for their paper. (See Howard’s article in the bibliography below.) This is a phase that will ultimately lead the writer to develop an individual voice. You can catch it if you read a draft. If it comes in the final draft, my advice is to warn the student that you can hear the other writer too loudly but not punish the student for it if the paper otherwise gives honest credit to the writer’s sources.
Finally, if you would like to do some reading on the subject of plagiarism, you can consult one or more of the articles below. This is a short version of an annotated bibliography on the topic that I produced under the auspices of a National Science Foundation grant that RVCC shared with Middlesex County College. RVCC’s portion of the grant was to work on ways to embed the consideration of ethics into the college curriculum. The in-house publication in which this bibliography originally appeared is titled Reading, Cases and Codes. (Sheila Cancella still has copies if you’re interested.)
Plagiarism: A Short Annotated Bibliography
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Plagiarisms, Authorship, and the Academic Death Penalty.” College English 57.7 (November 1995): 788-806.
Howard’s discussion occurs on two levels: The cultural level, wherein ideas about intellectual property are arbitrary and in a state of flux, and the pedagogical level, wherein individual instructors must do their best to encourage students to become authors. She argues that institutions and instructors should take into account a student’s motives before making accusations of plagiarism. She explains the notion of patchwriting, the name given to student writing that so thoroughly mimics its source that most instructors apply the term “plagiarism.” Howard asks us to consider, instead, the idea that patchwriting is a transitional phase of student writing which occurs when the understanding of sources is incomplete. Her argument is thoughtful, interesting and useful to instructors who assign research writing. Her “Proposed Policy on Plagiarism” is a sane and thoughtful response to the varieties of plagiarism and worth looking at.
Nienhuis, Terry. “Curing Plagiarism with a Note-Taking Exercise.” College Teaching 37:3 (1989): 100.
The author details an exercise that could be used in any class to help students avoid inadvertent plagiarism by forcing genuine summarizing rather than the source-to-notebook copying done by most students as “research.”
Tarlin, Ellen. “Five Reasons Students Plagiarize, and What Teachers Can Do About It.” The Harvard Education Letter 12.3 (May/June 1996): 3-5.
This brief article does precisely what its title promises. As such, it is quite useful for the instructor who would like to one or two (or even five) suggestions about ways to combat plagiarism this term
Whitaker, Elaine E. “A Pedagogy to Address Plagiarism.” College Composition and Communication 44:4 (December 1993): 509-513.
Professor Whitaker details her semester-long efforts to teach her students to avoid even inadvertent plagiarism. Although she expends more effort on the project than most of us are likely to be willing to put forth, the exercise that she explains in detail could be adapted for use in a less intense discussion of the subtleties of citation.
Wilhoit, Stephen. “Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism.” College Teaching 42: 4 (1994): 161-164.
The author’s patience with this subject (which can be an emotional one for teachers) is signaled by his early reminder that “most cases of plagiarism result from honest confusion over the standards of academic discourse and proper citation.” The article that follows classifies types of plagiarism, from buying a paper from one of the companies that brazenly advertise their services all over campus to paraphrasing from a source without documenting; discusses the most common reasons for student plagiarism; and offers some genuinely helpful advice for how teachers in all disciplines can guide their students. His reminder that the conventions of citation (and thus the definition of plagiarism) differ from discipline to discipline and, therefore, must be taught in each course, will bring a round of applause from exasperated English teachers.
If you enjoy reading your students’ long research papers, then you should continue to assign them. But if you dread the task, perhaps you should think about what you want them to get out of it. It’s possible that they could accomplish your goals in a way that’s less painful for you and for them.
If you want them to read important journals in your discipline, evaluate them, learn to discriminate between a worthy and suspicious web site, consider one of two alternatives to the research paper.
• An essay about doing the research. Assign your students the task of finding reliable sources that will help them answer a significant question or explore a topic in your discipline that interests them. Give them a fixed number. The paper that they write is not about the topic so much as about their efforts to research the topic. Written in first person, it explores the steps, missteps, side tracks and eureka moments involved in their research.
• An annotated bibliography. If you want to omit the narrative inherent in the essay about doing the research, the annotated bib may be just what you’re looking for. One problem you have to overcome is that most journal articles begin with an abstract. You can ask your students to include the abstract then write a paragraph on the source’s usefulness in terms of the research topic.
• Group research: Divide your class into groups and require each to find X number of articles on their topic, with the understanding that the only sources that can be used are those selected by their group. Sources have to be photocopied and submitted along with whatever writing is done from them. Students can produce individual papers, individual annotated bibliographies or a group annotated bibliography. One way to require more individual work on an annotated bib is to have each students choose what they consider to be the 10 best sources, annotating them in a way that justifies their choices.
• A paper-in-parts. Allow students to write a longer essay with headings instead of transitions. They may begin with an abstract, proceed to the literature review, write a statement on the research question, then divide their answer to the question into three or four subheadings. Students persist in the notion that good writers start with the first word and write perfect sentences through to the last word. Dividing the topic for them this way encourages them to work on sections as they feel they have enough information.
• A research paper. In this mode you have your students do some research and then write a few pages. (You’ll need to decide how much research and how much writing.) You read and respond and either grade or give points. Your response should guide your student’s further research. The student does more research and rewrites the paper. You can have this be the last stage or you can keep going. This is one way to get more depth in their research, allow them to take missteps, and allow them time to read, think, and rethink their topics. (This is Brock Haussamen’s assignment.)
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