Assignment Sheets. Use assignment sheets with evaluation criteria included for major assignments. Also provide students a grading rubric for each assignment. Be sure to call students’ attention to these as they work on each successive assignment to avoid confusion about how their work is evaluated. Ask students to bring a hard copy of these materials to class. They act as a useful guide or heuristic for students, and they help prevent misunderstandings. Students will write approximately 4,000–6,500 words each semester. Instructors normally require six to eight major assignments, and they must assign at least five major assignments. Extra credit is not given in the Foundation Communication courses.
Rubrics. In addition to assignment sheets, provide students with a detailed rubric for each assignment that explains the evaluation criteria you will use when grading the work. You should use the programmatic rubrics provided for you in your Canvas template. (For oral presentations only, instructors may develop their own assessment rubrics.) Each rubric outlines criteria based on the rhetorical pentad: context, substance, organization, style, and delivery. You can ask the Director of ISUComm Foundation Courses or the Assistant Director for assignment rubrics.
In-Class Writing. In addition to journal writing, two compositions each semester may be written in class: an initial baseline sample and a final exam. Instructors may handle the baseline in a number of ways, but because both English 150 and English 250 stress the communication process, this initial assignment may be best used as a draft to be revised as a longer assignment. A literacy autobiography is yet another possibility for an initial in-class writing, allowing students to interrogate past communication experiences and project how they will build upon them in the English 150 or 250 setting.
Revision. Students should be encouraged to revise their writing throughout the course. One full global revision may count as a major assignment for the course and be included in the ISUComm ePortfolio submitted at the end of the term.