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Faculty Core Guidelines by Category

  X. CAO, Option B: Writing Intensive Experience in the Discipline (WID)

 

OBJECTIVE:

The objective of a writing intensive component of a core curriculum is to enable the student to communicate effectively in clear and correct prose in a style appropriate to the subject, occasion, and audience.

 
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REQUIREMENTS:

  1. New courses approved for the core curriculum must be non-advanced courses except for substantiated reasons justified and approved on a course by course basis.
     
  2. The request must show how the course intends to meet the exemplary educational objectives, as set forth by the Coordinating Board. This shall be done by including a syllabus that addresses the appropriate objectives.
     
  3. To meet Coordinating Board requirements that core courses be evaluated, requests for new core courses must present processes and procedures for evaluating course effectiveness in regard to appropriate objectives and must delineate how the evaluations will be employed in course development.

    Relevant guidelines derived from the CB's Criteria for Evaluation of Core Curricula appear below:
    1. How is the course consistent with the appropriate elements of the core curriculum component areas, intellectual competencies, and perspectives as expressed in "Core Curriculum: Assumptions and Defining Characteristics" adopted by the Board?
    2. How are the institution's educational goals and the exemplary educational objectives of the core curriculum recommended by the Board being achieved?
    3. What processes and procedures are being used to evaluate the course and its contribution to the core curriculum?
    4. How will the evaluation results be utilized to improve the course and its contribution to the core curriculum?
       
  4. The course must require substantial writing (at least 3,000 words, including at least one piece of work done outside of class and returned to the student prior to the end of the semester or term with the instructor's written evaluation of grammar, style, and content).

 
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EXEMPLARY EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES:

  1. To understand that writing is contextual and to develop writing skills specific to a disciplinary area through invention, organization, drafting, revision, editing, and presentation that addresses the disciplinary content and meets discipline-specific criteria.
     
  2. To understand and demonstrate the shared writing conventions, practices, standards, constructs and methods of a specific discipline.
     
  3. To understand and demonstrate through writing the issues and purposes of a specific discipline.
     
  4. To understand and apply basic principles of critical thinking, problem solving, and technical proficiency in the discipline through written exposition and argument.
     
  5. To develop the ability to research and write a documented paper or report that conforms to the standards of the discipline and to establish an identity in a particular discipline or profession.
     

 
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