The Writing Center's consultants strive to help students understand and engage with writing assignments in productive ways. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter assignment sheets that are difficult ...

Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, ...

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a ...

1. Students X, Y and Z are sitting around a table in the library working on a group research exercise assigned by the professor which is due tomorrow. The objective of the assignment is to build on ...

In the pandemic, with classes online, teams working remotely, and conference rooms empty, managing group work (and writing with a group) is a challenge across industries. I’ve been taking on this ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...