Just because you’ve always done something doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it. Hitting your head against a wall is a good example. And if you’re a teacher, assigning research papers is another good example.
Hitting my head against a wall is a good way to describe how I felt after years of assigning research papers to students. They were bored researching and writing them, which meant that I was bored when I ended up reading them.
Research papers make the fallacious assumption that students are going to be writing long, research documents with traditional pages and paragraphs once they graduate from college. They won’t, not unless they’re going to graduate school. Will they be writing and researching? Of course, they will–but they’ll be writing and researching business plans, power point presentations, multimedia projects…
So I put together a list of writing/research projects that ask students to flex the same academic “muscles,” so to speak, that they would if writing The Research Paper, but asks them to flex those muscles in ways that are more relevant to their chosen fields.
So kill your research paper assignment. Your students will thank you.
