That last paragraph is what I am feeling right now as well. I needed a stop-gap so I can catch my breath and figure out my long-term strategy.
I think having in-class writing can be a really benefit, especially if you consider doing it in stages where students aren't doing an entire project all at once but just writing on pieces of it dur…
That last paragraph is what I am feeling right now as well. I needed a stop-gap so I can catch my breath and figure out my long-term strategy.
I think having in-class writing can be a really benefit, especially if you consider doing it in stages where students aren't doing an entire project all at once but just writing on pieces of it during class. Not sure what that looks like for you. But this was an idea that briefly flashed for me while building the discrete structures class -- go ahead and do proofs or challenge problems or whatever, but they are done in stages, where one day the assignment is to write out the framework of an argument, then the next day it's adding details, etc. I couldn't get far enough on this idea to make it viable but I'm thinking about it.
Re: length requirements, I think there's a lot to be said on imposing an upper limit on word or even character counts. For data science people brevity is the soul of wit.
Thanks for the reply. I've never given explicit upper limits on length; on a short paper assignment I'll say something like "half a page is probably too short and more than three is probably too long". Picking a number and enforcing it sounds like a good idea. On more traditional assignments, the grading rubric will include something like "did you refrain from including unneeded output?" or "Is your reason for including each piece of reported output clear?", and "are the written portions of your solutions limited to only what is needed to answer the question at hand?" To me, those are clear standards. I sometimes wonder how clear they are for my students.
A lot of outside-class assignments are a mix of reporting data analysis output and writing about it. It's a challenge giving good guidelines here, that make it clear what kind of answer isn't sufficient, and what kind of answer is more than needed. And, of course, getting them to size their plots so they don't take up an entire page :) I've never considered putting a limit on those assignments, but now that you mention it maybe I should. I wonder if, instead of plots that are too big, I'd get plots that are too small...
That last paragraph is what I am feeling right now as well. I needed a stop-gap so I can catch my breath and figure out my long-term strategy.
I think having in-class writing can be a really benefit, especially if you consider doing it in stages where students aren't doing an entire project all at once but just writing on pieces of it during class. Not sure what that looks like for you. But this was an idea that briefly flashed for me while building the discrete structures class -- go ahead and do proofs or challenge problems or whatever, but they are done in stages, where one day the assignment is to write out the framework of an argument, then the next day it's adding details, etc. I couldn't get far enough on this idea to make it viable but I'm thinking about it.
Re: length requirements, I think there's a lot to be said on imposing an upper limit on word or even character counts. For data science people brevity is the soul of wit.
Thanks for the reply. I've never given explicit upper limits on length; on a short paper assignment I'll say something like "half a page is probably too short and more than three is probably too long". Picking a number and enforcing it sounds like a good idea. On more traditional assignments, the grading rubric will include something like "did you refrain from including unneeded output?" or "Is your reason for including each piece of reported output clear?", and "are the written portions of your solutions limited to only what is needed to answer the question at hand?" To me, those are clear standards. I sometimes wonder how clear they are for my students.
A lot of outside-class assignments are a mix of reporting data analysis output and writing about it. It's a challenge giving good guidelines here, that make it clear what kind of answer isn't sufficient, and what kind of answer is more than needed. And, of course, getting them to size their plots so they don't take up an entire page :) I've never considered putting a limit on those assignments, but now that you mention it maybe I should. I wonder if, instead of plots that are too big, I'd get plots that are too small...