This article shares an assignment that has been successfully implemented in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) macroeconomic courses available to major and non-major undergraduate students enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College. While the outcome at the end of the semester is a paper of about three pages, the steps designed to assist students with completing it are important because they provide a detailed research and investigation guide. The assignment is composed of a series of scaffolded tasks that engage students in data collection, data analysis, and interpretation using economic theory of the subject area, presentation of the actual findings compared to predictions of economic theory, and investigation and interpretation for convergence and/or divergence from the economic theory. This assignment is based on prior research on the benefits of assigning writing in economics courses and aims to achieve the outcomes described by the structure of cognitive process dimension of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl, 2002).

This article introduces a flexible and adaptable Map Composition assignment to promote cartographic literacy. With applications to composition and writing across the curriculum, this assignment promotes students’ awareness of the rhetorical nature of maps, which is important as maps inform and influence public discourse on wide-ranging issues. Student work shows how composing a map can lead them toward improved rhetorical awareness, cartographic literacy, and engagement with place-based civic issues. The article acknowledges limitations of teaching maps in writing classes and concludes with discussion of how this assignment can be adapted to a range of courses to promote cartographic literacy in support of broader literacies and civic engagement.

This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.

Scientists and writing studies scholars agree that students need to be able to repurpose scientific knowledge across audiences, goals, and genres. This article offers a much-needed, practical example of an assignment that allows students to work towards these goals. Working collaboratively, a faculty member from biology, a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) administrator, and an Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) editor redesigned a conservation biology course assignment around communication with multiple audiences. The assignment required students to produce a webpage about a rare species in Alabama that fulfills the technical, scientific writing component of the course and then repurpose that webpage into an entry for EOA aimed at a non-expert audience. We elaborate on the context in which the repackaging assignment developed, explain how it fits with student learning outcomes in biology, and share themes we noticed in students' reflections on the practice of repurposing their writing.

This article details an assignment sequence asking students to apply an adaptation of Swales and Feak's (2009) model of social sciences abstract writing to articles in the humanities. This model works as an exploded diagram of the article, explicitly identifying research questions, data, methods, results, interpretations, and implications. The assignment provides students, first, with a reading tool for exposing the articulated construction of academic research articles. Second, as a writing tool, it allows students to practice comprehensive synthesis; the breakdown of multi-part claims; concision and clarity; and selective quotation. Finally, it facilitates the next step in students' research process: framing new inquiry by identifying uses and limitations in prior scholarship. This assignment sequence has been used in first-year composition and upper-division WID/WAC courses in the humanities; it can be adapted for courses in social and natural sciences and for graduate courses.

This scaffolded writing-to-learn activity incorporates a number of Writing Across the Curriculum-based suggestions that draw upon the strengths of student reflection, the PTA (prioritization, translation, and analogization) model of concentric thinking, and the benefits of a flipped-classroom approach to learning. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explain what one model for structuring a flipped classroom that purposefully integrates writing in the PTA model looks like and to provide a concrete example of a flipped-classroom activity that I have utilized in numerous introductory sociology courses.