Adjusting WID Tasks to Your Teaching Context

As teachers determine goals for writing and their time commitment, they discover an entire spectrum of writing they might assign in their classes. Your decisions will be based on complex factors, but the simplified grid below can point you toward additional materials that might be most useful to you as you plan your writing component for each class.

Use this grid to suggest which kinds of writing might be most appropriate in your classes:

Goals	to help students learn foundational concepts to check students' understanding of material	to practice critical thinking, reading and writing	to practice writing conventions of the discipline
Level of students	mostly freshmen and sophomores	mostly majors	mostly senior majors
Typical enrollment	over 75	35-75	fewer than 35
Possible assignments	writing-to-learn prompts	reading journals lab or field notebooks response papers	real writing tasks for audiences students will write to as professionals in field academic papers based on journals in the field library or other source-based writing

Of course, teachers often assign a combination of write-to-learn activities as well as formal research essays.