Professors assign a wide range of types of assignments, depending on the subject area and specific requirements of the course. Traditional essay type assignments can be excellent for skilled upper division students who have already learned the conventions of inquiry and argumentation in a discipline. But for many college writers, especially undergraduate students and students from other cultural traditions, such freedom can be debilitating. Not yet at home with academic writing or with the discourse conventions in a discipline, these students may producing wandering all about papers rather than arguments or quasi plagiarized data dumps with long, pointless quotations and thinly disguised paraphrases. When designing formal writing assignments, instructors should consider carefully the kind of writing they hope for and the processes they want students to follow. Sometimes slight variations in the way an instructor designs a writing task can cause significant differences both in students writing and thinking processes and in their final products. For example, some assignments encourage careful planning and formal top down organizing.

Such assignments can encourage thoughtful study of difficult material and teach structured, analytical reading and response. Other types of assignment can be structured to encourage more personality, voice, energy, and spontaneity. In general, instructors can influence the thinking and writing processes of their students by varying such aspects of the assignment as the audience, the rhetorical context, the writers assumed role, the purpose, or the format. When planning assignments, therefore, teachers need to consider not only the learning goals they have set for their courses but also the thinking and writing processes that they want to invoke in their students as learners. Designing critical thinking tasks works best if teachers focus their assignments on their main teaching goals for the course. A combination of formal and informal assignments and other kinds of critical thinking tasks can be created that will help students meet many of the teachers course goals.

These may include writing to learn assignments such as informal, exploratory writing assignments including journals or learning logs. Students errors, mistakes, and misunderstandings can provide valuable insights into their thinking processes and provide clues about how to redesign and sequence instruction. For assessing students learning, short write to learn assignments are particularly effective because they provide direct windows into students thinking processes. Another type of informal assignment is a reflection paper that allows a student to write about their personal response to the course material. In more formal writing assignments, students appreciate handouts explaining each writing assignments that the students can refer to at a later time. Handouts should ideally include the following information: task, format, expectations about the processes to be followed, and criteria for evaluation. Developing high quality writing assignments is one of the best ways for professors to improve student writing across the curriculum.

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A good writing assignment deepens students engagement with course material, promotes critical thinking, and helps them learn the disciplines discourse 150 its characteristic methods of inquiry, analysis, and argumentation. Bean, engaging ideas: the professors guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom san francisco: jossey bass, 2001 , chapter 5. One important way to improve students writing is to engage them in critical thinking about a topic at hand. Professors in a discipline traditionally focus assignments on tasks that are traditional to their discipline, and that address topics that are central to the material being learned. However many instructors are not accustomed to considering relationships between assignments and critical thinking.

In adopting this role, the teacher presents students with assignments that require critical thinking, gives students supervised practice through in class lectures and discussion in thinking through and solving the challenges of such assignments, and coaches their performance through encouragement, modeling, helpful intervention and advice, and critiquing of their performance. Once professors focus on critical thinking, planning lectures and class discussions can shift from the traditional model of simply imparting information to incorporating critical thinking problems for students to wrestle with. This process entails shifting the focus of a course from being entirely text or assignment centered to incorporating problem centered, challenging thinking that can also be incorporated in objectives of the writing assignments. Tasks linking course concepts to students personal experience or previously existing knowledge are especially good for engaging students interest in a problem or a concept before it is addressed formally in class or in readings. These tasks also help students assimilate new concepts by connecting the concepts to personal experience. Cognitive research has shown that students best assimilate a new concept by linking it back to a structure of known material, determining how a new concept is both similar to a different from what the learner already knows.

The more that unfamiliar material can be linked to the familiar ground of personal experience and already existing knowledge, the easier it is to learn. Another way to develop students abilities to think critically is to ask them to explain course concepts to the class or to a fellow student, either during a class in relation to material currently under discussion or at the beginning in relation to material covered in a previous class. This can be an excellent way to vary the pace of a class and to incorporate review without taking excessive class time. In so doing, students search for ways to tie the course concept into the knowledge base of their peers. It also takes them temporarily out of the student to examiner role and can help them to develop confidence in what they know. Here are some specific types of assignments that can help to develop critical thinking:

thesis support assignments

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Thesis support assignments also lend themselves to believing and doubting exploratory tasks or collaborative learning exercises in which groups are asked to develop arguments for and against the thesis. French opera are examples of topics where in class debate could enhance students engagement with the topics and their critical thinking skills in a way that could be very enjoyable for the students. In which the professor gives the students a question which they have to try to answer through thesis governed writing, or to contemplate through exploratory writing or small group problem solving. Often the assignment specifies an audience also 150 a person other than the teacher who either poses the question or needs the answer.

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Most teachers can get a ready supply of these questions by sorting through old essay exams, which often make excellent small group tasks or write to learn tasks for journals, practice exams, or papers. Often the questions can be incorporated into humorous studies or problem situations that make the assignments more fun. Which in a sense are the flip side of the thesis provided assignment: the teacher provides the data, and the students must determine what thesis or hypothesis the data might support. The professor provides a topic sentence and an organizational frame that students have to flesh out with appropriate generalizations and supporting data, generating ideas and arguments to fill the open slots in the frame.

Often the frame is provided by an opening topic sentence, along with the major transition words in the paragraph. Students report that such assignments help them learn a lot about organizational strategies. what if assignments that ask the students to step out of their normal point of view and to adopt an unfamiliar perspective or assumption. Such assignments stretch students thinking in productive ways, and are excellent critical thinking exercises. This is a superb way to develop reading and listening skills, and to improve the precision, clarity, and succinctness of students thinking and writing. In composing a summary of an article, for example, the writer must determine the hierarchical structure of the original text, retaining without distortion the logical sequence of its general statements while eliminating its specific details.

Summary writers must also suspend their own views on a subject to articulate fairly what may be an unfamiliar or even unsettling view in the article being summarized. Summaries can vary in length: perhaps the most common length is 200 250 words, but some instructors have used one sentence summaries. In another variation, students can be asked to write a one sentence prйcis or abstract that is exactly twenty five words in length. By requiring exactly twenty five words, the assignment forces students through considerable revision, in which they must play with syntax and question the value of every word. Asking students to write summaries of class lectures promotes careful listening and note taking skills, and has been shown to improve test scores.

traditionally teachers have often thought of writing like a box and wrapping paper into which we put our already formulated ideas. The problem is that, once writing is imagined as packaging, students often find little use for it. Separated from the act of thinking and creating, writing becomes merely a skill that can be learned through grammar drills and through the production of essays that students do not want to write and that teachers do not want to read. But the writing process itself can provide one of the best ways to help students learn the active, dialogic thinking skills valued in academic life. Students need to learn that the elegance and structure of thesis governed writing 150 as a finished product 150 evolves both from critical thinking, and from the process of drafting and redrafting. Thesis governed writing is thus the exterior sign of an interior thinking process that we as faculty need to help our students develop.

The habit of problem posing and thesis making 150 critical thinking 150 does not come naturally to beginning college students, who write more clearly when given assignments that do not challenge them as thinkers. Students will produce cognitively immature prose as long as their attitude toward knowledge remains in the early stages of intellectual growth. To use writing as a means of thinking, teachers need to make the design of writing assignments a significant part of course preparation and to adopt teaching strategies that give students repeated, active practice at exploring disciplinary questions and problems. Additionally, it is important to emphasize inquiry, question asking, and cognitive dissonance in courses and, whenever possible, to show that scholars in a discipline often disagree about answers to key questions. Teachers need to show that writing 150 through critical thinking 150 is a way of discovering, making, and communicating meanings that are significant, interesting, and challenging.

Bean, engaging ideas: the professors guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom san francisco: jossey bass, 2001. This course is part of the mit communications intensive program, and requires that you write at least twenty pages during the term. Two concert reports of two concerts each, two pages per concert attended, are collected halfway through the course and again toward the end. They should reflect your study in culture areas beyond traditional rock, pop, jazz, or western classical music.