Mike's reading notes #5

I think Davis has some really good advice regarding student writing. Writing is a necessary component in both undergraduate and graduate educations, and I feel it is a skill that takes an enormous amount of practice. I like the suggestion to hand out a list of books that students should refer too for questions as well as making sure students are aware that there is a campus writing center. I always find it interesting how many students have no clue that the writing center exists. That is why I think it is helpful to assign multiple trips to the writing center as a portion of a larger writing assignment.

In class writing assignments have always been an issue for me, because I don’t know how much time to allow students to write, especially considering that people write at different speeds. How do you make sure everyone has an adequate amount of time to answer? When I was an undergraduate student and participated in these activities, I always felt like there was a lot of unnecessary down time. Would it be more effective to assign these writing assignments in a similar fashion to our weekly reading notes for COMM 702?

I am a big fan of turning parts of a larger assignment into smaller assignments. Currently, I am in a course that is doing this for my thesis, and it is highly useful. One of my big focuses is research, so I will always include assignments to improve a student's research ability. With the advances in technology and the enormous amount of information available through interlibrary loan, I think it is also great that Davis suggests having a librarian come to class.

As far as grading is concerned, I am honestly lost with this. It seems like every educator I talk to has their approach, and it greatly differs from everybody else. There is a part of me that likes point systems because a student can add things up and figure out where there grade came from. Percentages seem to confuse students, especially when courses have weighted averages. When they go to look at their grade, they have no idea why it is a certain value due to all the different weights and percentages involved. Another thing I have wondered about is how to move assignment due dates at the request of the student, or handling their late work. Personally, I had times in my undergraduate education where I had so much stuff due so close together, it was a headache no amount of planning ahead could fix. I always felt that I could have done better work on all the assignments if I was allowed to spread them out, even by a few days, but that simply wasn’t the case. What strategies do others use to handle this?