Using Models in Class

See assignments SFSU Prof. Amy Conley (of Child and Adolescent Development, or CAD) developed to teach the Policy Memo Assignment. The first document outlines the assignment; the second is a rubric; and the third is a model paper. Prof. Conley's materials provide a good example of how SFSU professors in GWAR classes fulfill the Academic Senate's criterion to discuss the writing conventions of a field during class.

Students are not likely to use materials such as a rubric if professors just pass documents out in class. Instead, rubrics and models are most valuable when they are integrated into a class discussion. In class, students can, in discussion with each other and their professor, evaluate the model using the rubric. In this way, they can gain valuable practice in understanding what a Policy Memo looks like; and they can learn more about their teacher's expectations for good writing.  

Giving students models and then discussing them in class may improve students' writing. In their work at Michigan Tech, Biology professors in the WAC program evaluated the quality of students' lab reports when they received instruction in reading and evaluating models, along with peer review. They found students did write better lab reports given this support (Flynn, McCulley, & Gratz).

Here is another example. When teaching Organismic Biology, Prof. Dan Lemons discovered that his students had particular difficulty writing the Methods Section of lab reports. Prof. Lemons decided that part of the problem lay in the fact that students weren't experienced readers of Methods Sections. To prepare them to do peer review, he created several Model Assignments, which he incorporated directly into the lab work.

In the attached assignment, students had to 1) read 3 sample methods sections written by peers; and 2) answer a series of questions about the sections. In addition, the professor annotated a lab report as a whole and discussed it with students. The peer review sheet he used when students completed their reports is available on the Peer Review page.