I will be making handbook assignments, though. I’ll be dividing up the material I want them to engage, and assigning groups of students in the class to study specific parts of it and teach it to the rest of the class. On Tuesday, let’s say, one group gets section 8a; another, 8b; another, 8c; and another, 8d. On Thursday they come into class and I put them into groups with the others who read their section. That group gets about 10 minutes’ planning time, and then they stand up and teach the material to the rest of the class. It’s true that this way, each student actually reads only one section of chapter 8. But at least they do really read and really understand that section. And when their group’s presentation ends, I ask the rest of the class to repeat what they just heard. If the class can’t say what they were just taught, the group does it again. This way the group not only really learns their material, but the class really listens to them, asks questions, and comes to understand the material, too.

This all works best, of course, if it’s anchored in a paper that the students are working on. I’ll talk about that in a separate post.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the eighteen student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

Do check out this new journal. With the field of writing studies growing at its current rate, the discipline needs new venues for scholarly publication. Here’s one, and I can testify to its rigorous, thorough peer review system. Very promising.