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T. Hodge (Salem State College)
The Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Salem State College helps faculty, departments, and programs identify effective ways to assign, use, and evaluate student writing. The program has been established in the belief that (a) writing can be a valuable tool to help students become better learners and that (b) in addition to writing clearly and thoughtfully, our students must also become fluent in the specific discourse conventions of their major disciplines. The Introductory Astronomy course has been designated as a writing-enhanced course since the spring semester of 2001. The course is directed at liberal arts majors and pre-service educators. Group activities during lecture are designed to introduce the students to some of the traditional mathematical and modeling tools of science, but homework assignments are dedicated solely towards utilizing writing to help students learn course content. Writing assignments include short, weekly papers discussing the results of modern research astronomy as well as two moderate length term papers that allow the students to explore a topic of interest in more depth.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tracy.hodge@salemstate.edu