Writing in Calculus
Writing Home |
Calculus I |
Calculus II |
Multivariable Calculus
These are some of the writing assignments I have used in Calculus
during my time at Wheaton.
If you use any of these projects, I would appreciate it if you would
drop me a note and let me know
what you think.
I am co-author (with Annalisa Crannell, Gavin LaRose, and Elyn Rykken) of the MAA book Writing Projects for Mathematics Courses: Crushed Clowns, Cars and Coffee to Go that is available at the bookstore on the MAA website.
The Logistics of Group Assignments
The students work in groups of two or three on each project
and turn in a joint paper approximately a week and a half after the
project is assigned. If you would like some background on how I
got interested in these projects, I've posted a
copy of my article
that appeared in UME Trends in September of 1995.
The students are often apprehensive about the grading of group projects, but
a system that I've found works really well is that I allow the students in the
group to determine the distribution of the points. For example, if a group of
three receives an 80 on an assignment, then they have a total of 3 x 80 = 240 points
to distribute among themselves. They fill out a form, sign it, and return it to me. For the most part, the students split the points
evenly, but as the semester goes on, they are more willing to allocate the points
differently. I have used this process for over a decade and have had to mediate only a handful of times.
Assigning Points to Papers
One of the reasons why the calculus projects have been successful is that
I use a checklist
to grade them. The idea
for the checklist came from a very nice article by Annalisa Crannell at
Franklin & Marshall College in PRIMUS 4, 3 (1994), 193-201.
She also has some of
her
writing materials on the Web. I have a slightly modified Professor Crannell's Writing Guide (pdf file) to reflect the changes I made in the checklist.
|
|
