This handout includes a range of writing assignments and activities you can ask students to complete in your course in order to promote their learning. Many of these assignments can have high stakes or low stakes versions. See the “High Stakes and Low Stakes Writing Assignments” handout for moreinformation.

This collection provides practical approaches and design ideas that can be easily implemented in tertiary education. If you’re looking for inspiration on how to use technology for teaching, you’re in the right place.

This handout presents two sample writing assignments aimed at evaluating the students’ prior knowledge belonging to a particular area.

Instructional expert Jim Knight visits Chris Korinek to observe his social science classroom. Chris and Jim discuss scaffolding techniques, and when to use closed versus open questions.

A high-impact writing assignment will target difficult concepts, sometimes called “sticky” concepts or, in technical terms, threshold concepts. Think about an especially important element of your course that is typically difficult for students to learn—but that they generally must learn in order to succeed in the course and move forward in the discipline. For example, economists might talk about opportunity cost; biologists might talk about drivers of evolution; literary critics might talk about close reading; and historians might talk about constructed historical narratives.

The Discussion Cards consist of powerful questions organized by subject area to get students thinking and talking about text. They are also translated into multiple languages.

Thank you for visiting our Tennessee Board of Regents OER Grant English 1020: Introduction to Literature course. The pilot launched in spring 2023. This Walters State Community College composition course focuses on reading and analyzing poetry, drama, and short stories. The course has been designed with Quality Matters standards, Universal Design for Learning concepts, Growth Mindset fundamentals, and Lumen Circles concepts.     

This handout presents two activities that would help students in scaffolding a research paper. The first one focuses on breaking down the big goal in a series of small tasks so as to provide students with direction. The second one will help you map the syllabus timeline according to the learning required for assignment completion.

Scaffolding is a means of breaking down assignments or tasks into manageable chunks in order to promote student learning and success. A well-scaffolded writing assignment should help students understand your expectations, learn course content, communicate with audiences, and write with a purpose in mind. Structured deadlines can get students working on meaningful chunks rather than writing the paper from beginning to end in one sitting.

However, scaffolding is not a one-size-fits-all tool. The kind of scaffolding you use will depend on your discipline, the level of the course and kinds of students enrolled, and the learning objectives you have set for them. This handout details three approaches to scaffolding you might use in your course: checkpoints, parts of the whole, and upping the ante.

Instructional designers support students through the use of scaffolding. Learn about the Zone of Proximal Development and how scaffolding supports this theo...