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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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Strengthening Student Presentations and PapersBy Scott Morgenstern, Political Science
For several semesters I have assigned group presentations coupled with individual papers in my classes on Latin American politics. The group setting provides the students an opportunity to work collaboratively and they have considerable leeway to explore topics of their own interest. These papers force students to organize their thoughts individually and wrestle with developing a thesis and organizing supporting arguments. Although I meet with each group outside of class to plan their presentations, sometimes I have been dissatisfied with the quality of both the presentations and papers. I have found that student presentations tend to be unfocused, and my perceptions were corroborated by student feedback. The feedback indicated that although students found that putting the presentations together was a valuable experience, as an audience they frequently found other students’ presentations tedious. Furthermore, papers were poorly structured. Too few students were seeking help when writing their papers, and many did not understand how to write a clear thesis or how to organize a paper within this discipline. As I worked on revising the format of these assignments last fall, I made use of suggestions from the Communication Across the Curriculum seminar and a CIDDE instructional designer who had also worked with me on ways to engage students more fully in class discussions. As in the past, the presentations form the basis for the students’ papers. However, I now require each group to list their thesis (or theses) as part of their presentation. As a class we discuss these theses and the evidence or arguments necessary to support them. This reinforces the connection between the presentations and the papers and engages the entire class. Furthermore, now the presentations must include potential essay questions and answers to those questions, and I tell the students that these essay questions may appear on exams. By publicly discussing the theses that drive the presentations and form the basis of the students’ papers, I am trying to focus attention on both the substance of the course and the demands of writing within our discipline. This is the first semester that I have implemented this new plan, and, from the work students are doing, I certainly count the change a success.
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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