George Fox University | Offices and Services | Academic Affairs | APPENDIX F

Appendix F

Assigning writing is the only way to help students improve their writing skills.

Writing assignments can be a way of getting students to integrate what they are learning with what they are thinking about daily.

Writing can encourage students to develop critical thinking skills.

Writing can keep students engaged in the class and their outside preparation for class.

But most importantly, written assignments are a major way for professors to participate in relationships with students.

At a small liberal arts Christian university like George Fox University, such an opportunity to build relationships needs to be taken very seriously, and needs to be a part of general education courses as well as upper division courses for majors.

In general assistants may help professors keep students accountable for daily work, keep records up to date, and coach students in the process of fulfilling assignments.

In general, student assistants may not grade written assignments when the grade is in any sense a judgment call, nor may they decide how to assess other student's learning.

Students come to a small university expecting to have more personal relationships with professors; part of this is achieved by interaction between student and professor over written work.

Students do not often perceive student assistants to be either experienced or knowledgeable enough to grade written assignments as competently as a professor.

Evaluating student writing is an important component of overall assessment.

Class size limits have been based in part on the assumption that the professor assigns some writing in every class that he or she grades.

Student assistants are best able to assess work that simply fulfills the assignment. They are less able to recognize and reward creativity or work that is more than usually thoughtful. They are also less able to diagnose and suggest remedies for work that is severely inadequate. The excellent and the inadequate categories of written work need particularly to be diagnosed and dealt with by the more experienced and prepared professor.

Any department may organize and implement a writing lab available to all students. This will work somewhat like other labs on campus--foreign language and mathematics, for example. Gifted student writers will tutor their peers on rough drafts of papers, coaching them toward better papers. Professors who so desire can require students to go first to this lab. Student tutors must be trained so that they do not rewrite papers, but they will do a first reading and make proofreading suggestions, give a few examples of editing possibilities, point out what is unclear to them, give suggestions for reorganizing, and help the student writer find a thesis.

Professors need to be aware of Writing across the Curriculum suggestions about how to include writing assignments without being overwhelmed.