Roosevelt University - Writing Program - ENG 102, Argumentation, Analysis, and Research

Instructor Resource Packet

ENG 102 (Argumentation, Analysis, Research)

Roosevelt University

Prepared by

Priscilla Perkins

Director of Composition

August 2004

Table of Contents

102 Basics  ....................................................................................................................................... 3

  ............................................................................................................. What a syllabus should include              3

  ....................................................................................................... 102 picks up where 101 leaves off              4

  ................................................................................................................... The roles of reading in 102              5

  .................................................................................................................. The roles of revision in 102              6

  ............................................................................................. The roles of mechanical instruction in 102              6

  ................................................................................................................. The roles of research in 102              8

  ................................................................................................ The role of web-based research in 102              10

  ....................................................................... What the Academic Success Center can do for students              11

  .................................................................................................................. Teaching academic integrity              12

  .................................................................................................. Writing effective comments on papers              13

Official Grading Rubric for ENG 102  .......................................................................................... 14

Sample Classroom Resources  ..................................................................................................... 16

  ........................................................................................................ First-day writing sample passages              17

  .......................................................................................................... Explanation of grading standards              20

  ...................................................................................................... Doing ethnographic research in 102              22

  .............................................. Keeping your group “together” when they’re doing independent research              24

  ............................................................................................................................. Drafting conclusions              28

  .................................................................................. Checking students’ abilities to document sources              30

  .............................................................................................................................. Evaluating websites              32

  .............................................................................................................................. The debate project              33

  ...................................................................................................................... Annotated bibliographies              43

Syllabus basics

The catalog title of ENG 102--Argumentation, Analysis, and Research--gives a brief but accurate description of what the course is about, but it doesn't suggest how interrelated the course's main activities are.  Students in ENG 102 practice analyzing data and arguments in published texts by other researchers, and they develop their own analyses of  issues that they decide to research themselves.  They learn about responsible and illuminating research strategies by reading the course texts assigned by their instructors, and they practice finding similarly well-researched materials for use in their own research projects.  Finally, they study the writing styles and documentation conventions in published texts as they learn how to create their own research paper trails (AKA parenthetical notes and "Works Cited" pages).

Your ENG 102 syllabus needs to include the following course- and section-specific information, as well as basic Composition Program and University policies:

              --Students in all sections of ENG 102 write two 8-10 page researched essays, for a semester-long total of approximately 5000 words' worth of revised, passing writing.  Instructors should include other kinds of assignments (journals, documentation quizzes, the TILT tutorial, research and ethnography exercises are all possibilities) in their syllabi as desired, keeping in mind that 1) more than half of the final course grade should be based on the two researched essays [for example, perhaps 25% for the first one and 40% for the second one], and 2) other learning activities should build whenever possible on the work that students are already doing for their researched essays.  See "Sample Classroom Resources" for ideas on how to do this.

              --Your specific grading policies, including the worth of each assignment, a description of what each grade means (see the attached "Grading Standards for Essays and Other Coursework" for an example).  You may choose to attach the official grading rubric for ENG 102 (included in this packet) to your syllabus, or you may hand it out when you give the first researched essay assignment to your class.

              --A list of required texts for your class, all of which should be ordered through one of the Roosevelt Campus Bookstores.  All sections of ENG 102 use Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference (5th ed.) for writing mechanics and documentation.  In addition, instructors should order either a single-subject, researched work of non-fiction, or a textbook on argumentation and research that includes readings.  Consult one of the Composition Program directors (Priscilla Perkins or Bonnie Gunzenhauser) for suggestions.

              --A class-by-class schedule of activities and assignment due dates.  Be sure to state that the schedule is open to revision as necessary, and that you will give students information in writing about any changes to the schedule.

              --Your policy about cell phones in the classroom.

              --Your policies regarding revision sessions, paper due dates (including your policies on turning in late work), assignment formatting (i.e., whether you prefer to have assignments turned in on paper or electronically [or both] , and how you want  students to present their work)

              --Your contact info (voicemail #, email address, office location and regular hours, mailbox location), including any special information about the best ways to reach you.

              --A statement of ADA compliance (for example, "Please talk to me at the beginning of the semester if you have a documented disability that may require accommodation.")

              --Information on deadlines for withdrawing from the course (available in the RU Course Schedule and on the RU website), as well as a statement reminding students of their responsibility to keep you informed of their status in your class (for example, "Let me know as soon as possible if serious work or family problems threaten your ability to complete the work for the course.  If you wait too long, you may miss out on university deadlines for withdrawing from your coursework, leading to a failing grade and possible loss of your financial aid.")

              --The Composition Program attendance policy (also available on the program website, http://www.roosevelt.edu/writing/students.htm): "Because the composition classroom is a community of working writers who learn from each other and support each other's growth, it's important that students attend regularly. Consequently, the program has had a long-standing attendance policy: 6 absences from a course that meets twice weekly, or 3 absences from a course that meets once weekly, can result in a failure.

              --The web address for the university's Academic Integrity policy: http://www.roosevelt.edu/plagiarism/.

              --Contact information for the Academic Success Center offices on both campuses: http://www.roosevelt.edu/asc/twlab.htm

102 picks up where 101 leaves off

Especially for instructors who are new to RU's Composition Program, or who haven't taught ENG 101 here, it may be helpful to know what students do and learn in the course immediately before ENG 102.  Students in ENG 101 spend the semester practicing their critical reading skills, drafting and revising shorter essays (usually 4-6 pages each), working on sentence-level mechanics and essay organization, and beginning to document ideas and passages from source texts.  Most sections of ENG 101 use a reading anthology from one of the major composition publishers (like Bedford-St. Martin's or Houghton Mifflin), and all sections now use Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference (5th ed.).  While there are a few ENG 101 instructors who emphasize the traditional rhetorical "modes" (i.e., narration, exposition, comparison/contrast, process, etc.), instructors are urged to make students' responses to what they read the central motive for writing in ENG 101.  By the end of ENG 101, students in most sections have written at least one six-page essay incorporating three sources (all of which may be from the assigned reading anthology).  Some instructors prefer to make the final paper a mini-research project incorporating sources from outside the students' reader.  Whether the last paper is researched or not, what's important is that students are becoming comfortable weaving other writers' ideas into their own discourse, adapting or even arguing with other writers' ideas when necessary, and maintaining a perspective that is identifiably the student's own even while they appropriate ideas from their sources. 

The roles of reading in 102

While it would be nice to assume that students enter RU's ENG 102 with strong critical reading skills under their belts, experience tells us that many students come into 102 with a limited ability to comprehend, respond to, and/or interpret complex arguments.  Some of these students have been through Roosevelt's own sequence of writing courses and are still not comfortable reading difficult materials; others, however, may have completed ENG 101 in writing programs that assign very little reading or require students simply to "report" on what they've read, rather than work actively with it.  Finally, because some students' placement test scores exempt them from ENG 101, we occasionally work with students who test well but whose senior reading and writing experiences in high school were not, after all, the equivalent of a college-level ENG 101 course.

The fact that so many of our students begin their research writing class without the skills needed to find, judge, and build on other published research means that ENG 102 instructors need to spend considerable time in the first few weeks of the semester evaluating students' comprehension abilities and teaching interpretive skills.  For this reason, many instructors have found that students benefit from working through a carefully-researched and -argued, book length, nonfiction text during the first third of the term.  Choosing a contemporary text that appeals to students is important, as the book becomes a model of what good research and clear writing can accomplish in the public arena.  Class discussion of the course text revolves around both content and rhetoric; through hands-on exercises, instructors should help students detect the concrete strategies a writer can use to set up her argument, work with sources, deal with alternative perspectives, craft introductions/transitions/conclusions, and document research (see Sample Classroom Resources for examples of exercises).  The first researched essay for the course can relate directly to the text that all students have read (see "The roles of research in 102" for more about the first essay assignment); instructors can often tell how well students are understanding their "outside" sources when they see how the students tie those sources to the one text with which all course participants are familiar.

By the second half of the term, students should still be reading a great deal in ENG 102, but the texts they read should be those they have located themselves in their research.  The sheer number of sources that students find prohibits instructors from knowing how well the students understand what they're reading, but it's still important to sit down at least once with each student, ask him/her to summarize a source's argument, and have him/her point to a few passages that might be usefully incorporated into the student's draft.  What instructors often find is that students carry sources around in a folder without actually reading them until they are ready to "assemble" a draft.  Asking students to talk with you and/or each other about the specific ideas in sources can help nip this disabling tendency in the bud.

The roles of revision in 102

Perhaps more than in any course in the composition sequence, revision plays a role that most students can easily understand---even if, on their own, they don't budget enough time for revision or practice revision strategies that substantively improve their essays.  That's why it's important for instructors to build revision time and activities into their syllabi, and to make the development of effective revision methods "count" toward students' final course grades.  

There are different ways of doing this, of course.  The simplest way might be to require successively longer, more complete drafts on specific dates, with peer revision sessions scheduled before or immediately after each draft's due date.  Along with substantive narrative and mechanical feedback, teachers may choose to give these drafts grades; on the other hand, they may avoid assigning grades until the final draft, on the assumption that students may be more likely to pay attention to "global" (rather than simply cosmetic) feedback on earlier drafts if they're in suspense about the grade.  Giving students a concrete rubric and explanation of grading standards (included in this packet) at the beginning of the writing process can help students see grading as less subjective, mysterious, and "unfair" than they sometimes think it is.

RU instructors have developed approaches to drafting and revision that emphasize how writers use these processes to develop new knowledge, construct more and more compelling arguments, and open up meaningful new research questions.  See Sample Classroom Resources for examples.

The roles of mechanical instruction in 102

Experienced teachers know that, as writers gain control of more advanced cognitive skills, they may temporarily lose control of simpler skills that they (and their instructors) had felt confident about.  For example, a student making strides in her ability to argue with ideas from outside sources may turn in a draft riddled with sentence fragments.  Then, of course, there are the (many) students whose control over writing mechanics is still not as complete as any of us (including they) would like.  Keeping these two typical situations in mind (and being open to other possible scenarios), ENG 102 instructors should be prepared to offer brief, positive, "mini-lessons" to their classes on an as-needed basis, and should judiciously mark patterns of error in student drafts.  Students with very disruptive patterns of errors should be referred to the Academic Success Center for regular tutoring appointments; referral sheets for you to duplicate are included in Sample Classroom Resources.

Teachers should plan to spend lots of class time teaching documentation skills (broadly conceived---not just how to punctuate bibliographic entries!). Begin by drawing students' attention to published writers' documentation practices in your course readings---in other words, to the logic behind their use and presentation of other people's ideas and words.  At bottom, good documentation is the trail of bread crumbs that helps a reader find and evaluate the writer's work with other sources ("The Hansel and Gretel Principle"). Here are some basic questions to discuss with students:

PDo the authors you're reading use an academic documentation style (MLA, APA, U Chicago, etc.), or a more journalistic style?

PWhat do different documentation styles tell you about the intended audience for your course text(s)? 

PAt what points in their writing do authors from the social sciences tend to invoke the authority of other writers? What about writers from the humanities or "hard" sciences? 

PHow does the use of source materials in websites differ from what you find in newspapers and magazines? 

More than with perhaps any other area of academic writing, of course, teaching documentation conventions requires a certain amount of  punctilious (no pun intended) "slogging" through the details of colons, commas, parentheses, and spacing.  Like other areas of academic writing, however, students gain the most competence by "doing" documentation, rather than by memorizing forms or studying sample bibliographic entries in a writing guide.  The goal of teaching documentation in ENG 102 is not to produce students who can independently assemble flawless bibliographic entries (can any of us do this without the help of a style guide?) but to help students understand why we document, how to tell the differences between kinds of sources (i.e. monographs vs. scholarly journal articles vs. essay anthologies....), and where in a writing guide to find the appropriate format for a particular source. 

Using students' own source materials to create bibliographic entries on the chalkboard can be an effective way to find out what students do and do not understand about MLA or APA style.  To be most effective, this strategy requires students to have their sources in hand, as it can be extremely difficult for many students to detect the difference between a magazine article and a scholarly journal article just by looking at titles.  Paging through an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, most students will note the lack of advertisements; likewise, looking at the title page and table of contents of an essay anthology can help them understand what the bibliographic abbreviation "Ed." really means.  Ask students what kind of work might be involved in editing an anthology.  What kind of expertise might an editor need to have? Why logistical challenges might an editor face in putting an anthology together?  (Of course, because so many academic texts are now available to students only via the university library's web databases, it can be harder for instructors to point out the physical differences between kind of sources.  Bringing in old-fashioned "hard" copies of scholarly journals lets students know what MLA means by "continuous pagination," while examining the editorial board of a journal can clarify what we mean when we talk about "vetted" sources.  Students are sometimes shocked when they find out how many levels of scrutiny a scholarly journal article goes through before it's published.) 

Scheduled documentation quizzes can test students' developing abilities to find their way through and apply the bibliographic samples in Hacker's A Writer's Reference.  Require students to bring a couple of sources to class, then shuffle the sources and hand them out at random to class members. Ask them to produce two completed Works Cited entries within a ten-minute period, then have them trade quizzes and check each other's work before you collect the quizzes. (Unscheduled, low-stakes tests can also be effective motivators, but teachers should be sure to mention on their syllabi that pop quizzes are a possibility).

The roles of research in 102

Students often enter ENG 102 believing that research involves finding a discrete number of sources that offer concrete viewpoints on a specific subject---say, euthanasia or gun control---creating a "thesis statement" that encapsulates commonplaces about the subject, reporting what each source says about the subject, and then concluding with a restatement of the thesis and vaguely inspiring (or threatening) gesture toward the future.  They know, of course, that this way of researching is quite different from research in biology, for example, or archeology, but they tend to think that "real" research is for people who have finished college.  What they are required to do is, at best, an imitation of research.

Without requiring undergraduate academic writers to develop completely unique projects involving primary ethnographic or scientific research, we can still help our students adopt a more active, engaged approach to the work they do in ENG 102---an approach that helps them see themselves as thinkers who may actually have new knowledge to contribute to established problems and who, before long, may be in a position to do the very kind of research that seems so foreign to them at the beginning of college.  (How do "real" scientists, economists, literary scholars, and public health officials get started, anyway?). 

Instructors who read a single-topic, researched nonfiction text with their classes can use this text as the foundation for the first researched essay.  If the text treats an issue that affects students in some tangible way, perhaps the best first essay assignment is one that requires students to develop a researched theory to explain their own relationship to that central theme.  This approach allows students to work with current recent in various academic disciplines.  For example, students working with Eric Schlosser's Fast-Food Nation have written papers exploring how fast food fits into single-parent families' eating habits (sociology/nutrition studies), how U.S. laws on teenage labor compare to those of other industrialized nations (economics/political science), how fast food advertising strategies use cognitive science to exploit the youngest consumers (psychology/media studies/marketing), and how rural teenagers' social lives center on fast food restaurants (anthropology).  The "self-directed researched theory" assignment (for lack of a better name) is extremely effective not just because it involves students in relatively advanced academic reading from the beginning of the semester, but also because it offers contained opportunities for original research: interviews, surveys, ethnographic observation, and simple experiments can all be worked into researched essays that treat students' own experiences as an important source of knowledge.

For instructors who want to create a more engaged "classroom culture" of research, one of the first tasks is to move students beyond what might be called the "topic paradigm."  Instead of starting with a research topic (like "recycling" or "eating disorders"), ask them to ask a real question about their area of interest: "What percentage of consumer waste needs to be recycled in order to make a significant difference in U.S. landfill use?" Or "How do eating disorders manifest themselves differently in African-American and White teenage girls?" This question can (and may inevitably) change in subtle ways as students find out what other writers have said and learned about their area of interest; students need to know this because many will impulsively decide to develop an entirely new question once they find out that few (or no) researchers have directly addressed the question they started with.  Unless teacher and student together determine that a research question is a dead end, switching research questions is almost always a dangerous waste of precious writing time for students in ENG 102.

Students may develop their research questions at the same time as they are finding potential sources; frequent, informal conversations with their instructors will help students refine the questions they are asking, and will help instructors detect the kinds of guidance that individual students need.  Sometimes the best thing an instructor can do for his/her students is to model good question-asking: when a student tells the instructor about the issue she is exploring, the instructor can begin asking very specific questions about the issue and about the sources the student is finding: "What government bureaus are responsible for collecting data about recycling? Do government sources provide different numbers from corporate sources? If so, why do you think that is? What do you think Eric Schlosser would say about this question?"  Listen carefully to the students' responses, and ask follow-up questions that suggest to the student both the richness of her research area and the need to look exhaustively (and creatively!) at many different sources of information.  When necessary, end this kind of informal conversation with a fairly pointed "meta" discussion of what you and the student did in your few minutes of talk: "Did you notice, Heather, that as we were talking, you made several observations about the unreliability of corporate information for understanding the economics of recycling?  Take a minute to write down the reasons you just mentioned; while you're at it, make a note to call the City of Chicago's recycling program, since it sounds like you'll need a much more local perspective on recycling than you're getting from the websites you've been looking at."  Make it clear to students that they are responsible for following through on at least some of the suggestions you make in your one-on-one discussions with them; if a student turns in drafts that show little evidence of careful, engaged research, let the student know that her grade will be negatively affected.

Very early in the semester, you should schedule a bibliographic instruction session at the library (http://www2.roosevelt.edu/library/instruction/index.htm).  By the time students are working on their second researched essay for the course, teachers take on the role of consultant rather than combined coach/cheerleader (though some students will continue to need much more support and structure than others; students may also request one-on-one help from a librarian by signing up at http://www2.roosevelt.edu/library/newsite/consult-form.htm).  On your syllabus, schedule a few "facilitated research" sessions in the library so that you can look at databases with students, and even, if necessary, accompany them to the stacks to help them differentiate between potentially useful and flimsy sources of information.

The role of Web-based research in ENG 102

In some ways, the electronic information age has made teaching and learning in ENG 102 much easier and potentially more rewarding.  Students have almost instant access to information that, ten years ago, would have taken weeks to track down. Every teacher of research writing knows, however, that not all electronic information is created equal, so one of our most difficult jobs is now to help students discriminate among sources that are top-notch, acceptable, questionable, and downright misleading.  TILT--the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial, available from the library home page on RU's website, www.roosevelt.edu--is one resource that helps 102 instructors find out what their students do and don't know about finding and evaluating sources.  Because student scores from this collection of teaching and testing modules can be automatically forwarded to their instructors, and students can revisit each module until they receive a passing score, some instructors make early completion of TILT a requirement in their sections of 102. 

TILT certainly doesn't cover everything our students (and we) need to know about the role of the web in student research writing.  Over the past few years, information literacy specialists--the people who used to be called reference librarians--have suggested a set of research benchmarks for undergraduate writing in first- and second-year coursework.  One of the most disconcerting findings of the recent Composition Program assessment of ENG 102 essays is that, while our students are coming close to suggested benchmarks for their use of single-topic, book-length texts, they are avoiding scholarly journal materials (in hard copy or electronic form) and are seriously over-relying on sources from the Web.  Here's what our research showed for 102 students in 2003:

PFor bibliographic citations pointing to monographic literature, the target of 15%; RU’s percentage is 13%

PFor scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles, the target is 30%; RU’s percentage is 7%

PInformation literacy specialists suggest that no more than 12% of a paper’s citations should be from websites; in RU student writing, the percentage is 37%. 

PIn RU students' citations from the web, 52% came from “.com” sites, 19% from “.edu” sites, 14% from “.org” sites, 10% from “.gov” sites, and 5% from “.net” sites.

P19% of the web addresses cited in student essays were not even findable by our assessor. 

Given the commercial bias, unreliability, and ephemerality of most ".com" websites, 102 instructors should steer students away from these sources, except as examples to be analyzed with the help of more substantive sources (for example, a student might use McDonald's corporate website to find out what they say about the nutritional value of their products, but whatever information the student finds would need to be examined in terms of less obviously biased information from independent nutritionists). ".Org" and ".gov" sites may be more useful, but these, too, need to be carefully evaluated by students: what agendas are their authors pushing? What contextual information do students need in order to put these materials into a meaningful framework?  Links within the websites for the Urban League and NAACP, for example, can't be expected to help students understand the relationship and conflicts between the two organizations; for that kind of information, they need to look at monographic or scholarly journal sources. 

        The Web presents obvious challenges to some students' academic integrity; see below for information on plagiarism.

What the Academic Success Center can do for 102 students

RU's Academic Success Center, directed by Nancy Litke, offers individual tutoring and group study skills seminars for students enrolled in any RU class at either campus.  ASC tutors can work most effectively when students bring graded essays and detailed referral forms from their instructors (see Sample Classroom Resources for a referral form that you can duplicate as needed), and when students commit to multiple tutoring sessions, rather than occasional "quick-fixes." Students in Composition Program courses can also self-refer; in order to get students quickly hooked up with services, teachers may want to announce at the beginning of the term that any student who received a "C" in his/her previous writing course should set up a regular tutoring appointment at the ASC. At the ASC, students can get one-on-one help with reading and note-taking (by learning how to make a "dual-entry" notebook, for example), with starting a draft, organizing parts of an essay, or polishing a draft that's close to completion.  In addition, students and tutors can work together to identify patterns of error in a draft, and can then develop strategies for catching those errors in new pieces of writing.  The web address for the ASC is http://www.roosevelt.edu/asc/twlab.htm.

Teaching academic integrity

It's easy for instructors to take a hard line on plagiarism---cheat, and you'll fail the course---but "zero tolerance" policies can be extremely difficult to enforce, except in the cases of students blatantly buying essays from online paper mills or pulling whole uncited passages from the internet.  Thanks to internet search engines like Google and new software like MyDropBox (available to teachers of ENG 101, ENG 102, and LIBS 201), this form of cheating is also relatively easy to detect.  Of course, the best way to avoid blatant plagiarism is to give "cheat-proof" assignments---ones that require students, for example, to analyze personal experience in terms of ideas they find through their research---and to build lots of process ("bookless" drafts, annotated bibliographies, and "workshopped" drafts; see Sample Classroom Resources for examples) into the assignment.  Grading students at least partly on their participation in process assignments makes buying a paper seem like less of an option; when students show up on a due date with a completely new research project, instructors should follow their noses straight to Google or MyDropBox.

What's much harder to prove and deal with is the plagiarism that results from students who still don't understand documentation conventions or have trouble paraphrasing from sources.  Usually the first clue that an essay includes plagiarized passages is that the diction level is inconsistent: for example, within a single paragraph, some sentences may be quite simple and spare (or may feature serious sentence boundary problems), while others feature complex subordination and lots of Latinate nominalizations. Likewise, the student-generated material surrounding a plagiarized passage may contradict or simply repeat what the plagiarized passage says, an indication that the student doesn't entirely understand the source s/he is incorporating.  In these situations, instructors might begin by marking the suspect paragraphs and writing "This doesn't sound like your writing voice.  Are you working with one of your sources here? Please talk to me."  Once the instructor and student are face-to-face, the instructor can point out exactly what makes the passage unacceptable, and can then "lay down the law" about plagiarism, explaining how serious the consequences can be for students who repeat this kind of error.  While it's important to document all instances of plagiarism (in this instance, by noting one's concerns in the margin of the student's draft), the dual document/"face-to-face" approach works better than just accusing the student in writing, because instructors can watch the student's face, give the student an opportunity to express confusion, and use his/her own voice and expression to impress upon the student the seriousness of plagiarism.

The university website clearly outlines forms of plagiarism and the university's official policies toward it.  All instructors should include the URL for plagiarism information (http://www.roosevelt.edu/plagiarism/default.htm) on their syllabi.  The Composition Program directors are always available to confer with individual instructors about suspected cases of plagiarism, "cheat-proof" assignments, and strategies for turning instances of plagiarism into "teachable moments."

Writing effective comments

Few things are more frustrating to struggling or accomplished student writers than getting back essays with only a few vague comments and a grade. Neglecting to tell students in specific terms what does and doesn’t work in their papers–not just at the mechanical level, but in terms of content and rhetoric–dampens students’ motivation to improve their writing. If they perceive that you are truly “listening” to their ideas and are committed to helping them improve their critical thinking and writing skills, they will work harder.  In addition to marginal comments that ask specific questions about content and make mechanical or stylistic suggestions, narrative comments that sum up the instructor’s response to an essay and indicate directions for improvement are one of our most important teaching tools.

Having said this, too many comments, or ones that are overly broad, can be almost as bad as no comments at all.  Especially with students who have a lot of hard work ahead of them, it’s important to emphasize only one or two areas for improvement on each essay.  Just as it makes little sense to overwhelm a student by “bloodying” her paper with red ink (chances are, she’s making just a few errors, but she’s making them over and over), it’s counterproductive to list all of the problems in a paper in your narrative comments.  A teacher can even write something like this: “While your paper suggests many areas for improvement, right now, I want you to concentrate on connecting your examples more firmly to your overall goals in the essay. When it comes to the mechanical aspects of your writing, I’d like you to work on your pattern of comma splices; I’ve marked the first few, and I’ll help you find others when you come to my office hours.”

Finding one positive aspect of the student’s paper–an especially appropriate example from the text or a sign that he is figuring out how to spot a pattern of error–is encouraging for both the student and you. Limiting your discussion of both positives and negatives to the most glaring keeps students from becoming more confused and it helps you approach your students’ work responsibly without getting overwhelmed yourself.

When it comes to the final draft of the second research paper, you need to balance the student’s need for concrete information about her grade with the realities that 1) you have very little time to finish evaluating student work before grades are due, and 2) students will not be applying your comments to a further draft of the paper.  “Shorthand” marginal comments will help you and the student know exactly where the paper does and doesn’t work.  In your end comment, you should summarize the main successes and problems of the paper (including, if necessary, your rationale for the grade you assigned to the project) and mention specific areas for improvement in future writing projects for other classes.  Incorporating specific terms from the ENG 102 Official Grading Rubric will help students look at your evaluation of their work as more than the subjective perspective of a single (if relatively powerful) reader.

Assessment Rubric for ENG 102 (Argumentation, Analysis, Research)

Priscilla Perkins, Director of Composition

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Continuation of English 101 (Introduction to Composition) with longer, more complex writing assignments in argumentative/analytical forms; increased attention to analytical reading; training in the use of the library (including electronic resources) and in writing from secondary sources.  All students write two multi-drafted, documented research papers.

OUTCOMES

•      Students will improve their abilities to recognize arguments, respond to argumentative claims, and critique rhetorical strategies in their reading of texts from academic disciplines and the popular media (including newspapers, magazines, television, and the web).
•      In response to their course reading and individual interests, students will learn how to identify and refine central questions that will guide their research.
•      Working with well-defined research questions (which may be modified as the students’ work progresses), students will locate paper and electronic sources, evaluate them for the quality of their information and relevance to particular research projects, and actively integrate data and perspectives into their own arguments.
•      Students will learn how to draft 8-10 page researched essays featuring well-defined statements of argument (self-consciously pursued through the whole of their essays), as well as effective introductions, transitions, and conclusions.  By participating in revision workshops with their peers, students will improve their abilities to revise their own writing for content, structure, and mechanics.
•      Students will learn how to use documentation guides for MLA and/or APA style in order to produce accurate bibliographies for researched essays.

9/04

SAMPLE CLASSROOM RESOURCES

The exercises and suggestions that follow are all developed and class-tested by instructors here at Roosevelt..  Instructors who have exercises that effectively support Roosevelt’s 102 pedagogy are invited to submit them for inclusion in future editions of the 102 Instructor Resource Packet.  Some of the exercises in this section are tied to specific readings and are presented as they’ve been used in the past; instructors can adapt them to fit the specific readings they are assigning. Others can be pulled out of the packet and photocopied “as is” for classroom use.

First-Day Writing Sample Passages

Assigning a reading-based writing passage on the first day of class gives students the important message that ENG 102 is, in equal parts, a reading and writing course.  The first-day sample also serves at least two other important functions.  First, it gives a valuable snapshot of students' writing skills at the beginning of the semester, so that instructors can immediately get to work with students on specific writing problems.  Less crucial, but no less appealing, is the fact that a first-day writing assignment automatically provides a second-day activity for ENG 102 courses; while students are digging into course readings on their own time, they can spend class time discussing the ideas they've produced in their first-day essay responses.

The following reading excerpts and prompts were developed for "themed" ENG 102 sections; while they may appear not to be related to the course themes (the Nazis and McDonald's aren't an obvious match....), they offer students terms and ideas with which to begin discussing central concerns in each course.

English 102: Argument, Analysis, Research

Theme: Inspecting Fast Food

Carefully read the following passage, and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:

              When the world first learned about the Nazi concentration and death camps, most civilized people felt the horrors committed in them to be so uncanny as to be unbelievable.  It came as a severe shock that supposedly civilized nations could stoop to such inhuman acts. The implication that modern man has such inadequate control over his cruel and destructive proclivities was felt as a threat to our views of ourselves and our humanity.  Three different psychological mechanisms were most frequently used for dealing with the appalling revelation of what had gone on in the camps:

              1) its applicability to man in general was denied by asserting-contrary to evidence-that the acts of torture and mass murder were committed by a small group of insane or perverted persons;

              2)The truth of the reports was denied by declaring them vastly exaggerated and ascribing them to propaganda (this originated with the German government, which called all reports on terror in the camps “horror propaganda”);

              3)The reports were believed, but the knowledge of the horror repressed as soon as possible.

              All three mechanisms could be seen at work after liberation of those prisoners remaining.  At first, after the discovery of the camps and their death-dealing, a wave of extreme outrage swept the Allied nations.  It was soon followed by a general repression of the discovery in people’s minds.  Possibly this reaction was due to something more than the blow dealt to modern man’s narcissism by the realization that cruelty is still rampant among men. Also present may have been the dim but extremely threatening realization that the modern state now has available the means for changing personality, and for destroying millions it deems undesirable.  The ideas that in our day a people’s personalities might be changed against their will by the state, and that other populations might be wholly or partially exterminated, are so fearful that one tries to free oneself of them and their impact by defensive denial, or by repression.

              Submission to the threatening power of the Nazi state often led both the disintegration of what had once seemed well-integrated personalities and to a return to an immature disregard for the dangers of reality.  Those Jews who submitted passively to Nazi persecution came to depend on primitive and infantile thought processes: wishful thinking and disregard for the possibility of death.  Many persuaded themselves that they, out of all the others, would be spared.  Many more simply disbelieved in the possibility of their own death.  Not believing in it, they did not take what seemed to them desperate precautions, such as giving up everything to hide out singly; or trying to escape even if it meant risking their lives in doing so; or preparing to fight for their lives when no escape was possible and death had become an immediate possibility.  It is true that defending their lives in active combat before they were rounded up to be transported into the camps might have hastened their deaths, and so , up to a point, they were protecting themselves by “rolling with the punches” of the enemy.

                                          ---from Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank”

Working closely with a few ideas from this passage, write an informal essay that explores what you tend to do with painful or frightening information.  Don’t try to fit your ideas into a “five-paragraph essay”---focus instead on using ideas from the passage in order to analyze your own experiences with unpleasant knowledge.

English 102: Argument, Analysis, Research

Theme: Literacy in the Internet Age

Carefully read the following passage (adapted from an article by an expert on webpage design), and write as much as you can in response to the assignment that follows it:

              Many webpage designers assume that readers know what sequence of information is best for them, that they can tell when they have read enough or judge whether they are reading is important.  However, the evidence suggests that readers are not very good at assessing the adequacy of the information they have encountered and are even worse at anticipating whether important or useful material remains in the portions of text they have not reached. 

              One researcher found that many readers, left to decide how much to read, stop too soon.  In his study, adults with varying technical backgrounds were given online, step-by-step instructions for using a mechanical device.  The instructions were presented in a hierarchical network that organized the steps according to major tasks; the bottommost level contained the directives for specific operations, such as turning on a specific switch.  At any level of the hierarchy, participants had the option of reading on to a deeper level of detail (using a menu-selection system) or attempting to carry out the steps.  This researcher found that the participants tended to stop reading before discovering crucial details--presumably with the impression that they understood what to do--and, as a result, failed to carry out the instructions correctly.  In contrast, participants who read and followed the instructions presented on paper, in traditional linear order, were much more successful at completing the task.

              Other researchers have found evidence that readers may fail to take full advantage of useful information available to them in hypertext.  In their study, fifth- and sixth-grade students were presented with a set of expository passages annotated with various online aids such as definitions, paraphrases, background information, and distilled main ideas.  Students who were allowed to select at will from these aids performed significantly worse on various comprehension tests than did students who were guided through all the aids. In fact, the free-selection group performed more poorly than did students who read the printed version of the linear text without any aids. 

              While the results of this study are based on the activities of schoolchildren, they are consistent with the first study's findings on adults.  Taken together, these studies suggest that when readers are responsible for selecting what text to read, they often omit significant information altogether, perhaps because they can't find it, they don't know it's there, or they don't think it's important.

                            --from Davida Charney, "The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing"

What does this excerpt help you say about your own experiences reading websites?  Thinking about a specific time when you were surfing the web (either for school or for your own entertainment), write an informal essay that uses terms and ideas from this passage to explore how you read electronic materials.

Sample explanation of grading standards

All instructors are recommended to distribute the ENG 102 Official Grading Rubric to their students, either at the beginning of the semester, or just as students are starting to draft their first researched essay.  The following “student-centered” (rather than teacher-oriented) explanation of grading standards, which summarizes what an essay needs to do in order to receive a specific grade, can also help teachers and students avoid unproductive arguments about why a paper didn’t earn an “A.”

Grading standards for essays and other coursework in ENG 102

A: Reserved for work that is highly insightful and original, extensively researched and carefully argued, substantively revised, very clearly written, containing a minimal number of surface errors and highly accurate documentation.

B: Reserved for work that reveals some originality in developing a research area and curiosity in exploring the ideas that grow out of that focus, that shows significant familiarity with and understanding of relevant published work, that has fruitfully used peer and instructor feedback, that is easy to read and contains relatively few surface errors, and which includes mostly accurate documentation.

C: Reserved for work that relies more on other researchers’ ideas than on the writer’s own insights and analysis of relevant publications, that is insufficiently researched and sometimes illogically or inadequately argued, that would benefit noticeably from more extensive revision, that has a hard-to-read style or disruptive patterns of surface error, and that reveals a writer’s problems understanding or carrying out correct documentation.

D and below: Work that lacks a coherent focus, that is seriously under-researched and insufficiently developed, that has not gone through the in-class and out-of-class revision process, that is very difficult to read, and/or lacks appropriate documentation is not passing work in this class.

Keep in mind that “plus” and “minus” grades are possible on your work for this course (though the University allows only “straight” grades), and that your essay and final grades may be based on some combination of the above criteria.  I’ll let you know where you’re doing well and where you need more work as the semester moves along.

Doing Ethnographic Research in ENG 102

ENG 102 offers wonderful opportunities for students to design and carry out small but original research experiences, using ethnographic tools developed by anthropologists and composition theorists.  Depending on the assignment, students may pick specific spaces or events to observe and write about; their observations can be worked into research projects that may be based on student reading of academic texts.  An ethnographic exercise, appropriate for assigning to whole classes, follows; instructors might adapt this exercise for use at malls, churches, parks, and other public spaces.  Other ethnographic exercises could require students to interview their co-workers, family members, or classmates (with their written consent) about course-related issues. Based on their experiences doing ethnographic research with their classmates, individual students may confer with instructors to design anthropological observations relevant to their own research interests.

ENG 102: ARGUMENT, ANALYSIS, RESEARCH                                       

ETHNOGRAPHIC ASSIGNMENT #1: “READING PLACES”

Working independently or with members of your group, spend twenty minutes closely examining one of the following features of a fast-food restaurant.  We’ll meet back in our classroom at 1:30 p.m.

As you put your observations into written form, keep in mind Eric Schlosser’s comment that fast food can function both as “commodity” and as “metaphor.”  What “metaphors” do you see at work in this McDonald’s restaurant? 

1) Geography

How does the restaurant fit into the neighborhood in which you find it?  What businesses and institutions surround it?  How does it fit into or affect the traffic pattern near it?  Why would you guess its owners chose this location?  What other kinds of businesses or institutions does this one remind you of? What other questions or observations can you come up with?

2) Internal architecture

What kinds of materials are featured in the restaurant’s interior?  What mood is established with the help of these building and decorating materials?  How does the restaurant’s design encourage people to move quickly through the purchasing area, stay and get comfortable in the dining area, eat quickly and leave, or.....?  What kinds of interactions between customers are encouraged or discouraged by the arrangement of the dining and other areas?  What other kinds of businesses or institutions does the interior of the restaurant remind you of?

3) Workers and work environment

What are the genders, possible ethnicities, and approximate ages of the workers you see? How do they interact with each other? How do they interact with the customers?   Do they look comfortable? Overtired? Happy? How else could you describe their appearance and body language?

4) Clientele

Describe the mixture of customers you see during a two or three minute span.  Thinking in terms of their ethnicities, social class, styles of dress, how similar or different are they from each other?  How would you describe their interactions with each other? After watching a few of them closely, analyze some “typical” styles of eating McDonald’s food

Keeping your group “together” when they’re doing independent research

Especially during the second half of the semester, when students are working on research projects that they’ve developed themselves, teachers may have trouble getting students to use class time productively (or even, in some situations, to come to class at all....).  Scheduling required activities that 1) help students deepen their engagement with their own research and 2) encourage them to spread their work out and rather than “cramming” it into the 48 hours before due dates leads to higher morale for students and teachers—and undoubtedly contributes to better overall student writing.  The following exercise combines individual reflection and group strategizing, and is appropriate for the week or two before students turn in a first draft of a research project.

PREPARING TO DISCUSS YOUR SOURCES                                  

Before you begin to work with your small group, take a few minutes to write informally about the sources you’ve found so far.

1) First, write out the basic research question (or questions) that are guiding your work right now. 

2) Why are you interested in this question? Do you have personal experience with the issue you’re exploring? What academic experience do you have with this issue (in other words, have you worked with similar questions or materials in other courses? Do these issues relate to your major or career interests?)

3) For three of the sources you’re currently studying or incorporating into your draft, explain very specifically:

                            a) who you think the author’s primary audience might be, and how you can tell

b) what ideas, perspectives, or research approaches you think each source will contribute to your draft

4) Describe some specific kinds of source materials you’re having trouble finding (not just titles that are inaccessible, but kinds of information that might help you explore your research question):

After you’ve had a chance to think about and describe your sources, share your this information with your peers.  When you listen to your peers’ descriptions of their sources, offer suggestions on what each writer might look for or do next.

PEER REVISION GROUP GUIDELINES:

SUGGESTIONS FOR RESPONDING TO EARLY DRAFTS

              At this stage in the writing process, most of you probably have a draft of your final project that feels very rough.  That's fine.  In fact, having a very "polished" draft at this point might make it harder for you to dig back in and work on the ideas that will ultimately strengthen your argument and make your project more coherent.  So the best thing you can do for each other right now is to ask as many detailed questions as possible, and offer numerous concrete observations about your classmates' drafts.  Here are some approaches you can take.  Try as many as you can, but remember that the carefulness and depth of your response is more important than simply "covering" a list of tasks.  (Essay writers: please bring your respondents' comments with you when we meet for individual conferences, so that I can review and give credit to those who have helped you.  Respondents: please remember to put your name on any drafts you read so that I can give you credit!)

              As you are working on these questions, be sure to write down your responses in a way that will make sense to the person whose paper you are reading.  Also be sure to make as many marks and comments on the essay itself as you can, so that the notes you make on a separate sheet will be easy to match up with the essay.

1)  How does the writer define the terms and/or approaches that are important to her essay?  Note any places where the writer's use of a term or approach seems to change.  What do these changes mean?  How could they be explained more clearly?

2)  Point out all the major transitions you can find in the essay (between ideas and examples, for instance, between parts of the writer's argument--there are other kinds of transitions, too).  Why does the writer make these shifts in thought?  In your own words, try to fill in any "gaps" in the writer's presentation of his ideas.

3)  Look for interesting (perhaps unexplored) connections between the writer's ideas and examples.  Comment on the relationships you see between these elements and write down whatever questions come to mind.

4)  What contradictions do you see in the writer's thoughts?  What do these contradictions tell you about the difficulties involved in the argument the writer is trying to make?  Offer suggestions that might help him work through or resolve (but not cover up or cut out) the contradictions you see.

6)  Respond in your own way to some of the quotes the writer uses.  What ideas do they spark for you as a non-expert reader of this essay?  Why is each quote necessary?  What more could the writer do with each one? 

7)  If the writer has an introduction to this draft, point out any ideas in the introduction that she is not yet exploring in the body of the essay (and vice versa: point out ideas in the body of the essay that need to be mentioned in the introduction).  If the writer has not yet drafted an introduction, point out elements in her essay that you think should be included.

8)  If the writer has a conclusion to this draft, explain whether you think it does justice to the new knowledge the writer has produced in the process of writing his essay.  (Remember: a conclusion must be more than a restatement of the essay's introduction--it must give the reader a sense that something has been accomplished through the writing of the essay, and it may direct the reader to a question or two that the writer now has but doesn't have room to address).  If the writer has not yet drafted a conclusion, suggest ideas that you think should be included.

Drafting conclusions

Most of us, unfortunately, are all too familiar with the “dog-chasing-tail” style of conclusion that many students have learned to write: the conclusion that restates (sometimes in the exact same words!) the opening paragraph of the student’s paper.  Somewhat more sophisticated, but sometimes just as problematic, are the “gimmicky” conclusions: the “thought-provoking” quote, the appeal to a brighter day, the warning of impending doom, and so on.  One way of helping students move beyond these high school-level approaches is to draw their attention to published writers’ strategies for finishing their work—for showing readers what their researched project has accomplished, why it’s important, and where readers might want to go with the new knowledge produced by the writer. 

Reading (and writing) effective conclusions

Working very closely with Hacker’s section on conclusions, write informally for the rest of this period about the specific closing strategies that Erik Schlosser uses in Fast Food Nation.  Once you have identified and discussed several passages that illustrate these strategies at work, discuss how the ideas and strategies you have encountered today might influence how you write the conclusion to your first research paper.  Again, be as specific as you can, and write as much as you can. 

Note: When I use the word “specific,” I mean that you should point to individual words and sentences in the texts you’re using--and then explain why you think they are significant.  When I ask you to write in specific terms about your essay conclusion, I want you to mention particular ideas that you’re working with in your projects, not your overall argument.

Checking students’ abilities to document sources

In general, ENG 102 is not a course that lends itself well to quizzes and texts.  Because it’s so important for students to become comfortable with documentation conventions, however, teachers may want to build one or more documentation quizzes into their syllabi, if only to motivate the handful of students who need the pressure of quizzes in order to perform.  The trick, of course, is to make the quiz a bona fide learning activity, rather than an opportunity for students to memorize and regurgitate.  Requiring students to use Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference during the quiz, and then having them look over each other’s work, gives them opportunities to realize what they do and don’t understand about documentation conventions.

DOCUMENTATION QUIZ

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose two of the sources available at your table.  Pull a short quote out of each text and write it out.  Working with the documentation guidelines in your copy of Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference, construct an in-text, parenthetical citation for the two quotes you have chosen and appropriate “Works Cited” entries for each one. 

The parenthetical citations are worth 10 points each, while each “Works Cited” entry is worth 40 points. Partial credit is possible; you may use the other side of the page if necessary.

1)

2)

Evaluating websites

Our recent assessment of ENG 102 research essays revealed that RU students are generally relying far too heavily on websites as sources for their papers; beyond that, they are having trouble differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate websites for their research.  For a thorough discussion of “Credible, Accurate, Reasonable, and Supported” web information, go to Robert Harris’s “Evaluating Internet Research Sources” website, at http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm

Putting argumentation strategies to work:

Hank Scott’s Debate Project

Robin instructor Hank Scott says, “This exercise provides opportunities for students to learn from one another and from reliable sources about debating controversial issues, uses of argument, research, documentation, editing, and working together using project management.  This project works best when students with differing levels of experience are distributed evenly among the groups.  Students should read the entire packet first and refer to it when preparing for the debate.  Spend at least two sessions making decisions as a group before you select the project manager.”

DEBATING A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE  

ASSIGNMENT:  Debate the issues related to "Exporting Jobs."

Your team has been selected by the Controversial American Issues Foundation (CAIF) to debate an important issue facing the American public.  Your audience will be the members of the Controversial American Issues Foundation, a group of business and professional men and women, and the Schaumburg Community Improvement Association, a group of homeowners and renters in this area.

Use this handout to help plan, organize, and evaluate the debate.  Your team assignment is:

1.     To research the issues and develop a 3-6 page position paper on your assigned position, pro and con, on "Exporting Jobs," You will need to know in detail about both sides of the issue.

2.     To select a team member or members to debate the issue.

3.     To study both sides of the question, as a team, argue the position assigned, and refute the opposing position.

RESOURCES TO CONSULT

Chapter 4 of Writing in the Disciplines by Kennedy et al,

The CQ Researcher, "Exporting Jobs,"

A Writer's Reference by Hacker,

Chapter 6 of the Simon and Schuster Handbook by Troyka, and web sites such as Parts of an Argument, Debate Central. <http://debate.uvm.edu/default.html>.

Use the library and the Internet to research reasons and evidence to support of your team's assigned position.  You need to consult at least 6 sources.  The CQ Researcher on “Exporting Jobs” is insufficient as a source for the debate, but you may use it to acquaint the team with issues, chronology, sources, and the current situation.

PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT:

This project is designed to develop your skills in writing arguments through teamwork and in-class debates on controversial issues.  Learn from the group, so you can use argument when you write essays on controversial issues.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

In project management, work is done through small group interaction.  Students learn the tasks of planning, assigning and completing tasks, making timetables and meeting deadlines.  Students learn to give and take constructive advice, to organize data from various sources, to collaborate when writing, and to achieve a uniform and appropriate style for a team-written document.  Students learn to evaluate and be evaluated by peers, and learn to manage a project and to be managed in order to complete a common goal.

As your instructor, I will consult and help you make discoveries and correlations between the models and theory.  Students can be creative in solving their own problems: meeting together for a working breakfast, faxing one another information, conferring by telephone and otherwise using their own resources to address the problem of the moment.  You can use your group page in Blackboard for communication while relaxing in front of your computer at home or in the lab.

At the same time that you are working as a team, you will be writing other essays of your own on issues other than those selected for the debate.  Students can learn things in the group experience that contribute to their understanding of similar tasks elsewhere, and likewise share their individual learning and expertise with the team.                                                                                                       

Use the student argument essays in WD and SS as a starting point.  Study how the arguments are developed and how sources are used for support.  Collect additional information from using the library and the Internet. 

GETTING STARTED

Develop a pro/con chart immediately.  Select one member of the team as a project manager to help the group plan, assign tasks, coordinate, make timetables, and meet deadlines.  Know and understand both the pro side and the con side of the issue.  Be prepared to debate either side.  You may be asked to reverse positions and debate the other side.  This will not be a problem if you have properly prepared to debate your side.

Assign sub-teams to develop the pro and con issues.  Learn to give and take constructive advice, organize data from various sources, and achieve a uniform and appropriate style for a team-written document.

IMPORTANT TASKS

!      Make a chart, listing the pros and cons, and possible positions.  (Extremely important)

!      Define the issues,

!      Write a claim that declares your team's position for each side of all the issues listed, and

!      Develop convincing arguments and counter arguments based on sound reasoning and solid evidence.

!      All material quoted or referred to must be fully documented using the MLA method described in MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

THE POSITION PAPER

Before you start, acquaint yourself with how a debate is carried out.  Plan the introduction, the thesis or claim, the main points, and the evidence to support each point.  Anticipate possible objections from the other side; plan your refutation of their points, and your conclusion.  The position paper is a tool the team creates to help you with these tasks.

The writing tasks each team must perform are:

!      Define the issues, pro and con,

!      Write a clear claim or thesis for your assigned position,

!      Develop effective organization,

!      Support claims with convincing reasons and detailed evidence,

!      Identify and refute possible counter arguments,

!      Analyze the audience,

!      Establish common ground,

!      Avoid errors in logic and argumentation.

The position paper should be a summary of the content of your argument, with lists of reasons and evidence to support each point and a list of the strategies you will use.  Use the position paper as a brief guide.  Try to anticipate and plan for what might come up.  Describe your position and how you intend to present it, and how you will deal with counter arguments from the opposition.  It is your battle plan.  The position paper is not the same as the typed manuscript you might speak from when you present the opening claim.  It is your overall strategy plan.

When the debate starts, the pro team presents opening remarks that lay out the pro case.  The con side then refutes arguments and points made by the con presenter.  Use the position paper to help you decide in advance how to respond: Anticipate and re-anticipate each time you get new evidence about what might be said by the other team.  Prepare answers ahead of time.  Be flexible, but don’t shoot from the hip.  Plan several possible responses for each point.  Plan your conclusion.  Strategy is important. 

Your three-six-page position paper must be a team-written document.  Use your skills as peer editors to get the best text for your team.  Obviously, it cannot be a last minute document where various parts are pasted together by one person without team editing and revision.  The entire team must check to be sure the content is correct and the style uniform.  If your names are on it, you are responsible for it and get the grade it earns.  Do not delegate this to just one person.

Because of the arbitrary assigning of teams to the pro or con side of the issue, students are sometimes dismayed to discover they are on the other side of the issue than that of their personal view.  However, they are often surprised to learn new things about themselves and about the issues that make for lively discussions.  Because you may have to take the other side and defend it, you gain experience in how to deal with and use counter arguments.  That is good--so enjoy!  Debates and preparing for them can be fun.

EVALUATION                                                         

The debate judge, the other team, and the instructor will judge team performance in the debate. 

The criteria for evaluation include:

!      Is the issue well defined?!    Is the thesis or claim clear?

!      Are convincing reasons or evidence presented to support each point?

!      Are counter arguments handled effectively?

!      Is the tone reasonable?

!      Is the organization effective?

!      Does the organization lead to a convincing conclusion?

Use these criteria to evaluate your position paper.  Also, remember that writing in the position paper will be judged in terms of the University Writing Standards.

WHAT TO HAND IN:

!A final draft of the 3-6-page position paper that includes brief summaries of pro and con arguments, lists of evidence and support information, and your strategies.

!A works cited page documenting the sources used.

!A Memo of Evaluation, i.e. an evaluation of your writing in terms of the University Writing Standards. 

!A list of the work done by each team member (research, writing, proof reading, debating, analysis, critiquing—any and all tasks involved in the project),

!A brief description of how this position paper was developed and put together.

!The pro/con chart you used to guide your planning.

!The judge’s evaluation forms that each team member wrote following each debate

!      Evaluations of team members by the project manager, and evaluations of the project manager by the team.  Evaluations should be shared with each team member and the manager privately.  Be helpful, not critical. Grades are not affected by these evaluations.

!      A brief statement of what you as a team learned about debate, research techniques, and project management.

!      Digital copies of all documents need to be handed in through the digital drop box in Blackboard.com

RESEARCH TASKS

Avoid plagiarism.  Follow principles set forth in Academic Integrity and The University Writing Standards.  Evaluate Internet sources and web sites using the Ohio State website on evaluation.  You may use the articles and information found in the library or on the Internet.  Use the MLA documentation method.  Be creative but accurate.  I will be available in class and by appointment to meet with the team as you plan the project.  Use the strategies for reading, summarizing, paraphrasing, elaborating and writing an essay in response to sources you studied from Writing in the Disciplines to help you.

SELECTION OF DEBATERS

Select your debater or debaters with great care.  It should be a person who understands the team's position fully, can think on his or her feet, and is prepared to refute the opposing arguments.  Test your assumptions through practice.  Practice debating with other team members before the debate.  (This is extremely important)

During practice and at the debate, the entire team sits at the table and acts as a coach for the debater, helping identify arguments, counter arguments and strategies before and during the debate (claim, refutation, and response).

DEBATE PREPARATION & PRACTICE        

1)     Revise and polish the first draft of your claim, refutation, and response.

2)     Evaluate your team's readiness for debate. 

3)     Practice presentation and refutation skills. 

This is your chance to get it right before being evaluated by the judges.

Apply what you have read about paragraph development, sentence structure and revision to help improve your presentation.  (See Hacker for help.)

Bring copies of the completed first draft to hand in and for each team member.  As soon as the draft is in acceptable form, begin to practice.  Locate an empty classroom, lounge, or other space near our classroom to use where you can adjourn to practice.  The more complete your draft, the more time you will have for practice.

By now, the project manager, in consultation with the team, should have selected the debater or debaters with care.  It should be someone:

-Who can make a convincing opening presentation,

              -Who can think on his or her feet when involved in refutation,

-Who knows and understands the team's position fully, and

-Who knows how to effectively refute the opposition, and who can make a strong convincing conclusion. 

Put your best foot forward.  Your grade depends on it.  Take the selection of the debater(s), the revision of your text, and the actual verbal, speaking aloud practice seriously.

Practice debating with other team members as soon as you have a debate draft. Practice timing your presentations.  During the actual debate, the timekeeper will cut you off at the end of the allotted time.

If you run out of material before the time is up, there will be a long embarrassing silence while the entire group waits for the timekeeper to mark the end of the unused time.  Do not let that happen to you.  Use the practice to polish the draft in its various stages.  The entire team acts as a coach, helping identify arguments, counter arguments, and strategies before and during the debate (claim, refutation, and response).  Encourage, criticize, analyze and refute the presentation. 

.

PROJECT MANAGER'S FORM FOR EVALUATING TEAM MEMBERS

Performance Appraisal for ____________________________________

(After each item evaluated, place an X in the appropriate column)

                                                                                    Superior – Acceptable - Unacceptable

1. Dependability

2. Cooperation

3. Effort

4. Quality of Work

5. Ability to meet deadlines 

6. Written comments on member contributions, areas of strength, areas for improvement:

TEAM MEMBER'S FORM FOR EVALUATING PROJECT MANAGER

Performance Appraisal for __________________________________

(After each item evaluated, place an X in the appropriate column)

                                                                                 Superior - Acceptable - Unacceptable

1. Ability to organize the team

2. Fairness in making assignments

3. Ability to resolve conflicts

4. Ability to motivate

5. Ability to keep on a time schedule 

6. Written comments on Manager's contributions, areas of strength, areas needing improvement:

IN-CLASS DEBATE SCHEDULE (Sample schedule from a previous debate)

Wednesday 3/5/03 

Thursday 3/6/03

ISSUE: Is America safer today than it was two years ago”?  (Or similar statement from the current assignment.)

PRO TEAM:

Claim: 5 Minutes--Pro

Refutation: 3 Minutes--Con

Response: 2 Minutes--Pro

CON TEAM:

Claim: 5 Minutes--Con

Refutation: 3 Minutes--Pro

Response: 2 Minutes--Con

JUDGING (Remember that this is a learning experience): 

!      During the debate: Each team should make notes about the performance of both teams. I understand that your primary focus will be on winning the debate and providing your own team with support, but try to be impartial.

!      After the debate: Discuss each question on the Judge's Debate Evaluation Form and discuss answers your teams wrote for each question.

!      Both teams rate the performance of both teams.  (I know your team was really the best, but as critical thinkers and critical writers draw on your ability to impartially rate evidence—as a learning activity)

!      Prepare and provide commentary and advice for each team—as a learning activity.

JUDGE'S DEBATE EVALUATION SHEET

Debate topic                            ________________________ Position _______________

Evaluator or team__________________________ Date                                                                                   _______________

Judge's score: ____________ Team score_______________

Judge the debate using the questions below.  Write something specific on each question.  Use initials to distinguish different speakers.

RANKING THE DEBATES: 

Each team will have ten minutes to debate its topic:

-Five minutes to make its claim (5 points) _________

-Three minutes for opposing refutation (3 points)________

-Two minutes for its response (2 points) _____

Use another page for making notes during the debate, then fill out your form individually, using the questions below for judging and the 10 point system listed for ranking. 

Next meet with the other members of your team and discuss the individual ratings.  Agree as a group on a team rating for each team you are evaluating.  Use these ratings to decide who is the winner of the debate.  Mark the rating at the top of the page.

QUESTIONS:

1.           Is the issue well defined?  Give specific examples to support your judgment.

2.           Is the claim (thesis) clear?  Briefly state it.

3.           Is the argument supported by convincing reasons and evidence?  List the main points and evidence to support each.  What reasons or evidence should the team consider adding to improve the argument?

4.           How are counterarguments handled?  List them.  Is a common ground established?

5.           Is the tone reasonable?  What strategies has the team used to insure that their argument was well understood, well presented and likely to be well received by the class?  What evidence of creativity and quality did you observe?  Be specific.

6.           Is the organization effective?

7.           What final thoughts do you have?

Other comments:        

(Judge's debate evaluation sheet)

FINAL PROGRESS CHECK AND REVIEW MEETING

Depending on the research and writing assignments and progress your group has already made, consider these progress checks as a review to help form plans for your paper and the debate.

!      If you have not already done so, consider appointing a pro team and a con team for each issue.

!      Discuss the your subject, pro and con, define what each issue is, (moral, legal, personal, social, property, etc.).  How will you approach it?  Make a chart, listing the pros and cons, and tentatively take a position.  (10 minutes).  Do this as a total group.  Analyze the audience and ask the team how your tentative position works with that audience.  This is still a group task (10 minutes).  Then have a sub-group write out the position you are taking on the issue, that is, the thesis positions you are willing to argue for (pro or con).  The entire team should approve this before going ahead.

!      Next list a) the main points of your argument, b) the strategy for presenting each of them (very important), and c) the reasons, examples, authorities and statistics you will use to develop and support each point.  This can be done by sub-groups and brought back for team editing and approval.

!      List the counter arguments of the other side, and responses to them.  It is the same process as above, except that you are looking at what the others might argue and how to argue against it.  Reformulate your thesis to get the best possible statement of your position.  ( 10-15 minutes)

!      Divide your material into the claim (presentation about five minutes), your best guess at how your opponents will refute your claim (they will have 3 minutes), and what you want to say in response to their refutation and to close out the debate (you will have 2 minutes to respond).

Practice as much as you can.  The assigned debater makes your presentation, but other members of your team refute, and then let the speaker respond.  Critique your practice session rigorously.  Debaters are judged on presentation, content, organization, and refutation.