For History 97, the sophomore tutorial, students peer review each other's work. Each student writes a primary source based paper, which is based on a shared source base that all of the students have read. Students have to provide detailed written and oral feedback on each of their peers' papers. To guide their responses, the instructors provide a list of questions or points to consider. Students are to identify the argument and evaluate the extent to which it is supported by evidence, the organization of the paper, and the quality of the prose.
In Animal Cognition, Dr. Irene Pepperberg's students learn how to evaluate scholarly work on animal cognition by trying to think from the animal's point of view of the experiment.
During J-Term prior to Field Geology (EPS74), students live in the Mojave desert for almost three weeks to map different pieces of the area in groups. The data will eventually be compiled into a composite class map.
In EMR16, for the midterm and the final project, students have the choose of creating a 2 minute video that explains three statistical concepts to a novice.
In this activity, students appropriate and manipulate the words, grammar and themes of a “classic” work in order to develop their own styles as creative writers. By turning an iconic medium into a popular genre, students learn that classic writers have done the same thing, borrowing and stealing other people’s words.
In Swedish Ba, Ursula Lindqvist's students do their writing assignments online. They do blog postings where they respond to certain prompts and react to each other's postings.
In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin used the song "Den första gång jag såg dig" (The First Time I Saw You) by well-known Swedish troubador Birger Sjöberg to help students learn past-tense verbs and about Swedish culture.
In Sociology 157, Dan O'Brien's students choose a topic of their choice relating to the Greater Boston Area. All assignments center around this topic, culminating in a final paper that resembles an actual science paper.
In the revision stage of their the paper, Jerusha Achterberg uses vegetables to teach students how to structure their papers so that the organization coordinates with the thesis. The idea behind this activity is to break the 5 paragraph mold students bring from high school.
In her Expos section, Jerusha Achterberg teaches how to clearly describe the methods the will be used in a subsequent paper. This activity was motivated by the fact that students were having trouble writing the methods section in their final paper proposals.
For the third paper of the semester, Jerusha Achterberg has her students do small-group workshops where they read and provide feedback for each other in groups of 2-3.
