research

Ethical Use of Generative AI for Conducting Research

Aimee Jones Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity demonstrates how to ethically use two Generative AI tools in the research stage of the writing process. In the last year, AI writing tools, most notably Chat GPT, have generated academic-integrity related concerns for university administrators and instructors. In a study conducted from the Spring […]

Ethical Use of Generative AI for Conducting Research Read More »

Learning to Incorporate Source Material with a Full Menu of Options: Developing a Discrete Skill in Isolation

Stephen David Grover Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Writing assignments often require students to perform a complex array of interrelated tasks all at once. For example, when composing a typical researched argument essay, students must keep their eyes on higher-order concerns like thesis, organization, and finding and evaluating evidence, while at the same time

Learning to Incorporate Source Material with a Full Menu of Options: Developing a Discrete Skill in Isolation Read More »

Fuzzy Logic: How the Fuzzy Definition of Plagiarism is Getting Even Fuzzier

Steven Engel and Staci Shultz Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Rachel Hall Buck and Silvia Vaccino-Salvadore’s Writing Spaces essay, “‘Doing Research Is Fun; Citing Sources Is Not’: Understanding the Fuzzy Definition of Plagiarism,” suggests ways to help students unpack the complexity of plagiarism. Our activity extends these essential conversations by examining several recent highprofile

Fuzzy Logic: How the Fuzzy Definition of Plagiarism is Getting Even Fuzzier Read More »

Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times

Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not

Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times Read More »

Discourse Communities Manual Presentation

Andrew H. Yim Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In this activity, which will take around 3-4 weeks, students are tasked to research one discourse community (e.g., college club, job, volunteer organization) that they have never joined or recently became a member of. They need to pick out the 6 elements of the organization including:

Discourse Communities Manual Presentation Read More »

Informative or Argumentative Infographic

Erin Breaux Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This multimodal assignment challenges students to think in a different medium and consider the impact of visual rhetoric. While composing an infographic, they learn skills such as concision, design principles, organization of texts and images, and use of statistics, charts, and graphs. The infographic works well for

Informative or Argumentative Infographic Read More »

Developing Fruitful Research Questions

Emily Spitler-Lawson Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description When I was a younger, less experienced writing instructor, I told a classroom full of first year composition students, “Write about whatever you want!” when introducing a major research-based assignment. As you can probably imagine, I very quickly learned that some student-generated topics and questions were more

Developing Fruitful Research Questions Read More »

A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice

Zoe McDonald Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity transforms a familiar annotated bibliography into a full class activity to give students hands-on knowledge of two central components of composing: writing as a social process (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) and “authority is constructed and contextual” (ACRL). As Tressie McMillan Cottom observes , “writing is always

A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice Read More »

“I Didn’t Know I Could Research That”: Using Objects for Research Topic Invention

Mario A. D’Agostino Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Objects matter. As material rhetoricians (Barnett & Boyle; Gries & Brooke), cultural materialists (Bennett), and compositionists (Rule) have recently noted, objects play an important role in our lives and composing processes. An excellent example of the cultural significance of objects and what they mean to their

“I Didn’t Know I Could Research That”: Using Objects for Research Topic Invention Read More »

Object Ethnography for the Real-World: Using Objects and Documents for Disciplinary Development

Meng-Hsien (Neal) Liu Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description As Writing Studies has sought to address multimodal and embodied composition, one area has focused on how objects mediate writing processes and identity formations (Shipka). This assignment represents a final term project for an advanced composition class with the overall objective of complicating students’ thinking regarding

Object Ethnography for the Real-World: Using Objects and Documents for Disciplinary Development Read More »