Twelve Typical Assignments

(For a more comprehensive description of each assignment, review the assignment link on the main 312 class page.)

Topic Description and Funding Source/Journal Choice Statement
(required; one page business letter format)
Most teachers have students work in groups on their topic descriptions before they offer feedback, with students bringing several copies of their topic description to class for guided peer discussion and review. I ask students to submit a revised version of the topic description to me a short time after the peer review. I usually ask for this as a brief e-mail message, since I find that e-mail is one of the most convenient and fruitful means of teacher-student communication. (Most students already have e-mail; those who don't can set up an account at the Rutgers University Computer Service [RUCS] Centers, of which there are several on the campuses: at Records Hall on College Avenue and at the Loree Building, Room 009, on the Cook and Douglass Campuses. For more information, call RUCS at 445-2296).

I encourage students to keep their initial proposals as informal as possible and to worry less about the form than the content of their proposed idea (another reason why e-mail might get a better response than a memo). It is important, however, to get students to put their ideas in writing so as to make their topics somewhat concrete and to provide an opportunity for you to respond. I encourage students to ask questions or to express their uncertainty, but I stress that they need to propose a specific topic and give some tentative details about the who, what, where, how and (especially) why of their project idea. It might be a good idea to list specific questions for the students to answer in the final version of the proposal. You can also have students consider the guidelines offered in the coursepack and on the main 312 site.

The letter should include a paragraph directly connecting the proposed article or project to the audience. The student should be aware of the mission statement or guiding philosophies of the funding source/journal board of review and address the link between their idea and their audience. Why would that group be interested in funding such a project? Why would the readers of the publication be interested in reading such an article? Often, our students have little "real world" experience and frequently have unrealistic expectations. They sometimes choose inappropriate sources simply because they have not had to justify the merits of their own ideas before. It is not uncommon for a student to propose a $ 15,000 research idea to a foundation that only gives $ 5,000 grants, or to choose a funding source that requires more credentials from their proposers than the student currently has in terms of education and experience. "I thought that when they saw how needed my project was, they'd give it to me anyway," is idealistic but naive. We need to guide them to keep searching for the very best match between idea and source of funding/publication.

Readings and Group Work Responses
(teacher's option; in the texts and coursepack, or from current students' work)
These exercises encourage students to practice working in groups, speaking in public, and dealing with difficult readings. Many of the readings also offer students terms and ideas for framing and understanding the larger purpose of their projects. For example, without a sense of what a "paradigm" is (as explained by Kuhn), many students have difficulty imagining more than the most basic research objectives. If they see, however, that they might need to research the theory or consensus view that supports their particular approach, or find examples of how other organizations solved similar problems to serve as models, they will be able to develop convincing and authoritative rationales for their projects.

Most students resist reading, often because they find it difficult and because they cannot see the immediate connection to the tasks of the course. Teachers who help to rationalize readings to students tend to gain the most favorable responses. Any activity that encourages students to read the essays and try to develop a useful understanding of the ideas they offer can be effective. Group work has become the preferred means of achieving this goal, since it also engages students in developing other skills useful to the workplace. The coursepack contains some guided peer discussion guides to use as a guide to group work or as a model for designing your own activities.

Resume and Cover Letter
(required; one page each -- though you can be flexible on length)
Students typically rate this as the most valuable topic covered in the course, since it often has an immediate impact on their lives. Pedagogically, this assignment offers an excellent opportunity to discuss issues of context and audience in preparation for the longer paper (for instance, the cover letter they write now is good practice for the letter of transmittal they will write to accompany their project proposal). This is also an excellent opportunity to stress sentence-level revision for style and to practice clear, concise, and error free writing in the context of polishing a finalized document.

These documents should be one page long, addressed to a specific employer, and written in application for a specific job. They can be graded on audience awareness, consistency, visual appearance, organization, and error-free proofreading. You should require students to attach a copy of the job description so that you can better judge their awareness of their audience's needs. Students should conform to the rules and strategies you discuss in class and the guidelines offered in the Career Services Guide and the Coursepack. Where these texts disagree, you will find an interesting opportunity to discuss how there are no set "forms" for any document. That is, there are no universal, "cookie-cutter" templates that students can use to insert information. The fact that students believe such templates exist is a symptom of how alienated most of them are from the writing process. We need to encourage students to see that there are many ways of making a document more appealing and useful for a specific reader and of discussing the information that is most relevant to a writing situation. Students need to "own" the styles they choose and the writing they do in all cases, but especially here. Books and teachers can only offer advice and direction.

Abstract
(required; one-two paragraphs)
Early in the research process, usually before the Annotated Bibliography is due, you should ask students to write a one-two paragraph abstract of one of their research sources. The great temptation for them will be to crib from the abstracts of articles available online. You may want to require them to submit the online abstract along with their original so that you can compare them. Stress the guidelines in Writing Papers in the Biological Sciences, which may be different from the guidelines of EBSCO or SIRS or whoever was responsible for the online abstract. Explain to them that they will often be required to write abstracts of their own work and to review the work of others in a quick, summarizing way, and that this assignment will be good practice for the one they will write later for their final project.

Writing Exercises
(teacher's option; of your own devising)
Sample exercises can be found in your teaching materials, the Things That Work link, and in the coursepack, but the best exercises come out of your own students' work. You might select examples of typical writing problems from among your students' drafts, put them on a photocopied sheet or overhead, and have students practice revising them for clarity. These exercises can address areas of general weakness while giving students practice in the techniques of clear and concise writing.

In discussing these exercises, teachers might emphasize how basic logic can solve most polishing problems, and that students must exercise the logic skills that they already have to develop their expertise in revising prose at the sentence level. Since the focus of the course is on content and context (which are "macro-revision" issues) we should not overemphasize micro-revision issues such as grammar and style, except in the context of polishing a finished document. Therefore, many teachers stress style only near the end of drafting periods (e.g.: as students are writing the final version of the resume, cover letter, midterm paper, or final paper)

Library Training Session(s)
(required; one to two sessions led by a reference librarian)
Arrange a meeting on your campus or at a specific library with a reference librarian (see "Useful Phone Numbers" above). This session will generally cover ways of using electronic bibliographies and on-line resources. You might also ask the librarian to discuss ways of searching for jobs or information on the world wide web. Some teachers have a follow-up library session to give their students time for hands-on practice, or to help a class that seems to have trouble with research. You might be able to run the follow-up session yourself with only minimal assistance from a librarian - or you might have the follow-up session at another library to increase students' exposure to available resources.

Annotated Bibliography
(teacher's option; a minimum of six sources)
An alphabetized and properly cited list of at least six sources, in CBE Style. This can include interviews, on-line information, newspaper articles and hard data. It is important to require a bibliography early in the term so that students do not procrastinate on research.

Most teachers who require a bibliography also require at least brief annotations to explain the relevance of each item to the project proposal. You can require students to write long or short annotations - from an abstract of each entry to a single sentence explanation. Ideally, students should present a useful mix of sources, ranging from timely news articles to scholarly or trade publications of some depth. In many cases, quantity and range of material is as important as its academic quality. While we want to encourage our students to use academic quality sources (which are authoritative, carefully researched, and usually the product of a rigorous fact-checking and peer review), we should recognize that some topics can be pursued through different avenues. Students should be made aware that not everything they read in the newspaper or on the internet is valid, and they should be encouraged to find enough corroborating evidence that their claims appear to be representative of a consensus of opinion. Most teachers find, though, that requiring a high minimum number total sources (generally six) is sufficient to generate at least the start of a passing paper. These can include interviews, online information, newspaper or magazine articles, and books, so long as the sources used are appropriate to the topic. Teachers generally do not accept papers that rely too heavily on old and out-of-date sources (especially if they are used for other than historical overview), on textbook information (which is overly abstract), or on internet sources (which are often untrustworthy, insufficiently detailed, or summaries of more useful sources).

The Midterm Paper
(required; minimum six full pages, counting the references pages).
This should be a letter of over four and no more than six pages, addressed to an appropriate and real audience. It should provide evidence that there is a need for the project/article, explain the research that justified this idea, and try to persuade the reader to attend the presentation (usually concluding by providing the place and time of the student's talk). The most important thing for students to do is show that they can support their claims with reference to hard evidence, research, or authority.

An alphabetized (don't forget to tell them, believe it or not) and properly written References page, prepared according to CBE Style, must accompany the midterm paper. Most teachers ask students to generate a bibliography before they write the midterm paper (see discussion above), but there must also be a References page (usually without annotations) with this assignment.

The most important aspects of this paper are evidence and audience. Students must cite, reference, discuss, and point to their source materials. They also must demonstrate an awareness of their audience's concerns and work to persuade the reader. Examples of the midterm paper are included in the coursepack and at the end of midterm paper discussion on the 312 page. Since we have not had students write journal articles in previous 312 classes, we do not have any examples of student journal articles or letters, but many of the same issues apply. You might wish to stress to your students that this letter must use logical appeals, and should not only appeal to emotion (pathos) or their personal merit (ethos).

Visual Graphic Aids
(required; at least three to accompany the presentation and final paper)
Because visual graphic aids are such an integral part of the presentation and the final paper, teachers usually ask students to submit examples of their graphics in advance of the presentation. This assignment works best if it is discussed in peer groups, and if you choose an example for general class discussion.

Some teachers ask for this in the form of a "Visual Aids Memo," which is a brief memo describing the attached graphics and briefly explaining how they help to support the proposal. Some teachers do not have a formal graphic aids assignment but instead ask students to bring graphic aids to class for peer revision. You might also combine this with a group discussion of visual graphic aids found in newspapers or magazines, or a discussion of visual aids used by previous students. Some teachers have put together a PowerPoint presentation with interesting visual aids to aid in discussion on the day this assignment is due.

Oral Presentation
(a 10-15 minute formal presentation, plus questions)
This is an exercise in public speaking. Students must address a specific audience and offer an informed opinion. They also must use at least three graphic aids and ought to make use of lettered overheads for clarity. Students should also field questions from the group. (Consult the guidelines in the Coursepack).

The presentation must last at least 10 and generally no more than 15 minutes (about 12 is ideal). Some teachers have found it useful to appoint students as timekeepers so as to maintain a strict order, as otherwise the presentations and discussions can easily run over. An egg-timer also works well. You should also use some sort of sheet for student responses to the presentations (included among your course materials). I usually appoint two respondents per presentation to save paper, but other teachers have found that they get more involvement if the whole class is asked to fill out forms for each speaker.

The oral presentation should be seen as an "oral draft" of the final project proposal, in which each student has an opportunity to present his or her ideas and receive extensive feedback from the group and the instructor before revising toward the final report.

Poster Presentation
(due the day of the oral presentation)
Students should set up their posters as they come into the room, in a place where they will not interfere with the oral presentations. At the end of the class, invite their fellow students to review the posters and put comments on them on the back of the oral presentation comment sheet. Before the presentations begin, you should review the sample Web sites on the 312 class page poster assignment and make up a brief guide sheet on good poster presentation, or review the examples on the Web sites with them in class if you are in a smart room or a computer lab. Collect the posters and review them in more detail yourself, but concentrate on certain criteria:

• Is it eye-catching and appealing?
• Does it accurately summarize the main ideas of the presentation?
• Is is informative?
• Does the creator have a good balance between white space, text, and graphics?
• Does the poster make you want to attend the presentation?
  

Consider this assignment in the same light as the oral presentation; we want to be helpful and constructive in our criticism. Most students will not have presented a poster before, so this should be a learning experience.

Final Project: Choice of Journal Article or Project Proposal
(required; 15-25 pages, prepared according to the description below)
Topics for this paper should be timely, focused, and addressed to a specific audience. It should take a specific perspective in offering recommendations for action. Information should be clearly presented and well signposted. The visual aids should contribute significant information, and not just be for decoration.

It is best if you offer students help in doing peer revision on successive drafts of the final paper -- usually by preparing peer revision sheets for the class or by eliciting a checklist of student concerns before setting to the task of peer critique in small groups.

Journal Article

The Journal Article must have these parts:

1. Transmittal Letter (or Cover Letter) -- addressed to the board of review or editors of the journal
2. Abstract -- one-two paragraphs
3. The Article -- at least ten pages
4. Visual Aids and Graphics--three visual representations of statistical information, incorporated into the article
5. References -- approximately two pages in CBE documentation style
6. Requirements for Submission from the student's chosen journal--use this to help you evaluate the article

The journal article final assignment packet should be no less than 15 and no more than 25 pages long, inclusive (i.e.: counting every page of the paper, including the cover letter and Requirements for submission. It should have at least three figures and an absolute minimum of six items in the bibliography. Most teachers require at least ten items in the bibliography.

STUDENTS MUST SUBMIT TWO COPIES OF THE FINAL JOURNAL ARTICLE (I prefer one copy in electronic form.)

Be sure to get signed Student Reproduction Agreements from any students working on journal articles.

Project Proposal

The Project Proposal must have these parts:
1. Letter or memo of transmittal, addressed to a specific audience
2. Title page
3. Abstract
4. Table of Contents (with page references)
5. Table of Figures (with page references)
6. Introduction
7. Research (or Literature Review)
8. Plan (or Recommendations)
9. Budget
10. Discussion (or Evaluation Plan)
11. Works Cited (in APA Style)
12. Visual aids (at least three, usually integrated into the body)
13. Appendix (if necessary)

The proposal must be no less than 15 and no more than 20 pages long, inclusive (i.e.: counting every page of the paper, including the cover letter and cover page). It should have at least three figures and an absolute minimum of six items in the bibliography. Most teachers require at least ten items in the bibliography

STUDENTS MUST SUBMIT TWO COPIES OF THE FINAL PAPER (I prefer one copy in electronic form).