Group items tagged

You get no credit for asserting the existence of something we already know exists.

You must shape and focus that discussion or analysis so that it supports a claim that you discovered and formulated and that all of your discussion and explanation develops and supports.

In that sense, you might state the point of your paper as "Well, I want to show/prove/claim/argue/demonstrate (any of those words will serve to introduce the point) that "Though Falstaff seems to play the role of Hal's father, he is, in fact, acting more like a younger brother who . . . ."" If you include in your paper what appears after I want to prove that, then that's the point of your paper, its main claim that the rest of your paper supports.

since most research papers are based on quotes used from various sources, Diigo provides a way to not only bookmark your sources, but also to manage and access your quotes, notes, and analysis.

The best way to do research is know what your thesis is for a given topic.

Having a thesis in mind can help you narrow research, even if you change your thesis during the process.

n this course, you will write a substantial research essay (6+ pages in MLA Style) on a topic of your own choice that relates to some aspect of the course material. In order to combat the procrastination (I-work-better-under-pressure) syndrome, this assignment has several steps all of which you must complete to achieve the best possible result.

It seems natural to assume that students in upper level courses will know the difference between a good term paper and a poor one. I've learned the hard way that this is an unwarranted assumption! My first attempts to use term paper assignments in my psychology courses were disappointing. The failure was partly my fault because I was not very specific in stating my expectations and the characteristics of good writing. Term paper assignments should be used as an opportunity to clearly demonstrate the differences between good and poor writing by communicating practices to avoid in the course assignment.

The following is a term paper assignment that I use in my Biopsychology course. The trend that you will notice in this assignment is that the expectations are very clear. For example, acceptable topics and information that should be covered within a topic are stated. In addition, classic space wasters such as huge direct quotes, long bulleted lists, large margins, and oversized fonts are illustrated as practices to avoid. As for the sources, the assignment clearly states that academic or peer reviewed sources are preferred whereas information from encyclopedias is considered unacceptable. These specific expectations help to clearly delineate the differences between good and poor writing practices.

But writing assignments are not just exercises in grammar and grading. They are exercises in learning

Psychologists and other cognitive scientists know so much about psycholinguistics, language, and memory that they should well understand the close link between composition and knowledge. Yet many view writing as only a means of assessing a students' understanding of course material, and overlook the profound impact that the writing process has on understanding itself

The act of writing is an act of thought

online communities of practice are necessarily a manifestation of connectivism.

I suggest it is possible to ask your students to write more, as long as you adapt your grading style

But you can also use informal, non-graded assignments to allow students to show themselves what they’ve taken in from lectures, discussion, and readings, especially at a point where they may not have fully mastered the material.

Rather than putting comments on paper after paper, you can teach course concepts and writing by featuring one or two exemplary papers.

(In a study conducted on one college campus, a faculty member gave a student assignment to a group of colleagues for analysis. Few of them could understand what the faculty member wanted. If experienced profs are confused, how can we expect students to understand?)

Some recent research shows that many students do poorly on assignments or in participation because they do not understand what to do or why they should do it.

Attending to the need for power could be as simple as allowing students to choose from among two or three things to do--two or three paper topics, two or three activities, choosing between writing an extra paper and taking the final exam, etc. Many students have a need to have fun in active ways--in other words, they need to be noisy and excited. Rather than always avoiding or suppressing these needs, design an educational activity that fulfills them.

there are no written exams for those who successfully complete the weekly assignments of regular social media engagement.

Google Specifically for Education From Google Scholar that returns only results from scholarly literature to learning more about computer science, these Google items will help you at school. Google Scholar. Use this specialized Google search to get results from scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, and academic publishers. Use Google Earth’s Sky feature. Take a look at the night sky straight from your computer when you use this feature. Open your browser with iGoogle. Set up an iGoogle page and make it your homepage to have ready access to news stories, your Google calendar, blogs you follow in Google Reader, and much more. Stay current with Google News. Like an electronic clearinghouse for news, Google News brings headlines from news sources around the world to help you stay current without much effort. Create a Google Custom Search Engine. On your own or in collaboration with other students, put together an awesome project like one of the examples provided that can be used by many. Collect research notes with Google Notebook. Use this simple note-taking tool to collect your research for a paper or project. Make a study group with Google Groups. Google Groups allows you to communicate and collaborate in groups, so take this option to set up a study group that doesn’t have to meet face-to-face. Google Code University. Visit this Google site to have access to Creative Commons-licensed content to help you learn more about computer science. Study the oceans with Google Earth 5. Google Earth 5 provides information on the ocean floor and surface with data from marine experts, including shipwrecks in 3D. Learn what experts have to say. Explore Knol to find out what experts have to say on a wide range of topics. If you are an expert, write your own Knol, too.

Active and Reflective Processing. Active learners tend to learn while doing something active---trying things out, bouncing ideas off others; reflective learners do much more of their processing introspectively, thinking things through before trying them out [12]. Active learners work well in groups; reflective learners prefer to work alone or in pairs. Unfortunately, most lecture classes do very little for either group: the active learners never get to do anything and the reflective learners never have time to reflect. Instead, both groups are kept busy trying to keep up with a constant barrage of verbiage, or else they are lulled into inattention by their enforced passivity. The research is quite clear on the question of active and reflective versus passive learning. In a number of studies comparing instructor-centered classes (lecture/demonstration) with student-centered classes (problem-solving/discussion), lectures were found to be marginally more effective when students were tested on short-term recall of facts but active classroom environments were superior when the criteria involved comprehension, long-term recall, general problem-solving ability, scientific attitude, and subsequent interest in the subject [15]. Substantial benefits are also cited for teaching methods that provide opportunities for reflection, such as giving students time in class to write brief summaries and formulate written questions about the material just covered [15,20].

reflective learners do well at individual research and design.

Unfortunately---in part because teachers tend to favor their own learning styles, in part because they instinctively teach the way they were taught in most college classes---the teaching style in most lecture courses tilts heavily toward the small percentage of college students who are at once intuitive, verbal, deductive, reflective and sequential. This imbalance puts a sizeable fraction of the student population at a disadvantage. Laboratory courses, being inherently sensory, visual, and active, could in principle compensate for a portion of the imbalance; however, most labs involve primarily mechanical exercises that illustrate only a minor subset of the concepts presented in lecture and seldom provide significant insights or skill development. Sensing, visual, inductive, active, and global learners thus rarely get their educational needs met in science courses.