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 ...

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 ...