Abstract:

As educators, it remains an ever-present challenge to engage students in critical writing assignments at the post-secondary level, made more difficult by the advent of ghostwriting through homework completion services (e.g., Chegg) or the recent availability of generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT). Students commonly report poor motivation, stemming from arbitrary rubrics which restrict expressive writing alongside nebulous expectations on what constitutes a perfect grade. Exacerbating this, students are often not taught how to write for their academic discipline and are not given the opportunity to improve as writing assignment grades are often final and have little room for negotiation. Additionally, students from underprivileged demographics or for whom English is not their first or fluent language may experience additional barriers with merely meeting the basic expectations that writing assignments require (e.g., grammar rules and technical word use) and may be further penalized. To that end, taking inspiration from other educational pedagogies such as “Ungrading”, we propose a novel, highly-structured, revision-based assignment, termed the Incentivized Improvement Method (IIM) which aims to foster originality and provide students with the ability to enhance their writing skills. The IIM is not merely an assignment with a revision component, but adopts a carefully curated and standardized approach to guide student writing success. Importantly, the IIM does not rely on strict rubrics or score evaluations based on a perceived “perfect” paper, but rather employs two methods of assessment: effort on an original submission and improvement on a revised submission following thorough comments from the grader.

Our data on the IIM, deployed across multiple courses at the University of Toronto, has shown that it:
(1) can be flexibly adapted to various styles of writing assignments, including lab reports, critical thought papers, and essays;
(2) reduces reliance on ghostwriting and generative AI content;
(3) allows for freedom of expression in the writing process without students relying on ticking boxes of a rubric;
(4) grades student improvement relative to their initial starting point, which maintains equity among a diverse student population;
(5) gives clear expectations and guidelines on where to improve; and, importantly,
(6) challenges students to actually engage in self-improvement.

In addition to fostering a more effective writing environment, the IIM has garnered positive feedback from students. From a pedagogical perspective, student papers have drastically improved in quality in courses where the IIM has been implemented with assignment grades being similar to typical single-grade writing assignments, which demonstrate that strict academic standards have been maintained amidst the higher quality submissions.

Keywords:

Education, writing assignments, pedagogy.