W2 COURSE REVIEW FORM

RECORD-KEEPING DATA
1.  Course Acronym, Number, and Title
CRIM 3638: Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System
2.  Instructor name: C. Tartaro
3.  Instructor Program/School
CRIM/SOBL

Course objectives

-  One of the course objectives involves developing writing skills

-  One of the IDEA objectives identified for this class will be about developing skill in written or oral communication

1. What writing assignments will be given and how will they be weighted in the grade? Specifically, consider what assignments you may include that tend to be in one of these categories in terms of student time and/or expectations for polished work or weight of grade assigned:

a. low stakes (e.g., journals, blog entries, online posts, in-class writing),

b. middle stakes (e.g., reading responses, summaries, annotated bibliographies), or

c. high stakes (e.g., research papers, final projects).

Remember that writing might include digital writing, writing for exams or quizzes, and/or writing in forms such as Power Point presentation or poster. You can copy and paste your list of probable assignments/weight in grade from your syllabus and add any necessary additional information.


Fifty percent of the grade for this class is based on the portfolio assignment. This is a capstone class for CRIM, and all of our capstones are required to have a significant project. This assignment falls into the high stakes category. The following is from the syllabus:

“The research portfolio: The research proposal is the major project for this capstone course. Students will select a topic subject to approval by the professor. The students will then have to identify a research hypothesis and then find ten peer-reviewed research articles that involves empirical tests of the students’ hypothesis. Students will write mini-papers critiquing each of the ten articles. The critique will involve the students’ evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s research design and a discussion of the results. The students will compile ten of these mini-papers. The next step of the research portfolio is to use your understanding of the ten articles the student reviewed to write a 15-30 page research paper. The paper will involve an introduction, literature review, hypothesis, discussion of why those articles were selected, methodology section, results, and discussion. You will not be collecting data by interviewing anyone yourself. Instead, what you will be doing is conducting a meta-analysis, or analysis of analysis. That means that you will report on whether, overall, the papers you read support your hypothesis. “

2. Explain how a minimum of 15% of instructional time in class or online will be spent engaging students in activities that are likely to improve students’ writing.

Students will be required to purchase the following two books:

Hacker, D. & Somers, N. (2010) A Writer’s Reference (7th ed). Bedford Books.

Pan. M. L. (2008). Preparing Literature Reviews: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (3rd ed). Los

Angeles, CA: Pyrczak Publishing. ISBN 1-884585-76-0

Both books cover writing, including plagiarism, sentence structure, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. The syllabus includes a page devoted entirely to writing skills. I plan to bring a member of the writing lab into class to introduce herself, explain what the lab will/will not do for students, and encourage students to use the lab to make them better writers. I will also create a power point presentation highlighting the do’s and don’ts of the portfolio assignment. Students will be submitting segments of the portfolio assignment throughout the semester. These are graded assignments, but students will have the opportunity to take my suggestions and improve the paper so when they hand in their final project, their grade can benefit from my help. Students will be encouraged to work with me on all papers before they are through. I will be grading portfolio segments and the final portfolio with a rubric that students will see prior to the assignment due dates. To summarize, students will be provided with the following items listed in the W2 course review form (a, b, c, d, e, f, g, I, and j).

3. On which of the following characteristics of student writing will you comment/grade?

Written work will be graded on the following: understanding and addressing audience, synthesizing information from multiple sources, analyzing data/ideas/arguments, stating an appropriate thesis clearly, idea development, writing introductions/conclusions, organization, supporting details, integrating sources, citation methods, style, voice/tone/level of formality, grammar and syntax, punctuation, and spelling. These items will be included in the rubrics that students will see before the assignments are due. I will also use Grade Mark on Turnitin.com to provide students with feedback.

4. Will students find, evaluate, or incorporate sources in this class?

Yes. Students will be required to use their knowledge of research methods to understand the quality of the research they area reading and critique it.

5. Will students use a particular style format.

Students will be required to learn and use APA style.

______

For Writing Advisory Committee

Notes:

Recommendations:

Approve/Disapprove