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UMass Lowell's First Year Writing Program

Student and Instructor Resources. Scheduled to be migrated to Blackboard FA23. (per Ann Dean)

Comprehending Abstract Concepts from Reading
Milena Gueorguieva

This activity can help students work with concepts from reading. Milena notes that it is a good one for involving quiet students in substantive conversation.

Milena chooses two key, related terms from the reading students have completed for homework. She asks the class to look back through the reading, finding the writer’s definitions of the terms. She  assigns half the class to work with one of the terms, and the other half to work with the other.

Then she pairs the students up, so that each member of the pair has worked with a different term. Each pair generates a list of differences between the terms.

Milena combines the pairs into groups of 4, and asks them to explain, in their own words, the writer’s argument about the two terms.

What Makes a Source Scholarly?

The purpose of this activity is to provide students with the chance to discover the common features of scholarly sources in a hands-on way. It also allows them to see examples of how scholars generate and participate in academic conversations.

 

Creating the Conversation

This activity provides students with the opportunity to practice entering into the academic conversation by reading a text aloud in class and then participating in a pass-around activity where students are asked to explain the concept being discussed and then argue, expand upon, or quantify the argument expressed by the author.

 

Working Independently with Scholarly Sources
Madeline Sherlock

This activity is designed to help students move from background reading into working independently with a scholarly source. After doing some background reading, each student finds a scholarly source, reads it, and brings it to class.

On their own, students write

  • A summary of the source’s argument and project
  • What makes the source interesting to them
  • How it fits in with the student’s anticipated argument or topic.

Then students share their writing in small groups. Other students listen, ask follow-up and clarification questions.

Prof. Sherlock also shares activities leading up to a research proposal assignment.

I ask students to use A Writer’s Reference when writing a research proposal. At home, they write four paragraphs that respond to the questions in the text. I also ask them to evaluate which proposal provides the fullest picture of the research project. On the same day, I have also asked students to bring in two outside sources, one that will fit their project and one that will not and ask them to respond in class to a different set of questions in A Writer’s Referencethat will help them to explain the usefulness of each source. Again, they share their findings with each other before they type up their partial annotated bibs for the next class.   That’s it