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Scaffolding Writing Assignments In Introductory Art History, Monique Kerman

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

As a result of my participation in WWU’s Backward by Design retreat in 2017, I sought to modify the written assignments of my introductory Art History course for pre-majors in order to better prepare students working towards a lengthy research paper. In course evaluations and anecdotally, students reported being intimidated by the size and scope of the final paper, and asked for more writing practice. I decided that instead of requiring a high stakes research paper as the culmination of the coursework, I would scaffold assignments throughout the course that would eventually lead students to composing a thesis around which …