research

Owning the Process: Co-Learning AI Through Critical Inquiry and Workflow Literacy

Activities, collaboration and group work, critical thought and analysis, digital literacy, genAI, information literacy, Process, professional writing, writing technologies /

Jennifer N. Mason Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This in-class activity invites students and instructors to co-investigate how generative AI and other writing technologies shape composing processes across academic and professional contexts. The activity is grounded in workflow literacy—defined here as the reflective practice of analyzing how tasks, tools, technologies, and collaborators interact across […]

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Teaching Critical AI Literacy through Popular Natural Science Articles

Assignments, critical thought and analysis, digital literacy, genAI, information literacy, Integrating sources, Process, research, rhetorical appeals and argument, rhetorical situation, writing across the curriculum, writing technologies /

Chad Lewis and Jackson W. Martin Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The writing classroom is an opportune space to teach students how to critically think about generative AI (GenAI) outputs and their limitations. This assignment asks students to compare the rhetorical situations of scholarly research articles in the natural sciences with their popular science

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Ethical Use of Generative AI for Conducting Research

Activities, genAI, metacognition, Process, reflection, 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

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

Activities, documentation, genre and discourse community, Integrating sources, primary source research, Process, quotations, citations, and style, research, secondary source research /

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

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

Activities, documentation, Integrating sources, plagiarism, primary source research, Process, quotations, citations, and style, secondary source research /

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

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Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times

Assignments, collaboration and group work, digital literacy, information literacy, research, rhetoric, rhetorical appeals and argument, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

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

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Discourse Communities Manual Presentation

Assignments, Community-engaged writing, genre and discourse community, Place-based Writing, research, writing technologies /

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:

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Informative or Argumentative Infographic

Assignments, information literacy, research, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

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

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Developing Fruitful Research Questions

demystifying writing assignments, prewriting and invention, research, secondary source research /

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

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

Activities, collaboration and group work, information literacy, Process, reading, research, secondary source research /

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

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