Optional Course Paper

In order to solidify and document your growing expertise in the Educational Data Sciences, you are invited to assemble all of the insights you generated in your weekly wikifolios into a term paper.  This paper will be worth up to 10 extra points and is the only way to earn an A+ in the course.

For many of you, the combined structure of the course and the paper should allow you to draft a paper that will be quite useful to your immediate colleagues. Further revision with input from Dr. Hickey and peers may yield a paper that is eventually worthy of presentation at professional meeting and even publication in a professional outlet. You may well have come across such meetings, organizations, online magazines, and journals while searching for resources.

On Expertise

Completing this course and particularly engaging extensively with peers should leave you with genuine expertise about EDS n your domain and particularly concerning your EDS challenge.  Certainly one course does not make one an “expert” in the general sense.  People who are widely regarded as “experts” have at least 10,000 hours of experience, which is five years of full time work.  Furthermore there are plenty of people who work at something for five years and yet still are not considered experts.

But most of you likely now know a lot more about EDS than your peers.  And because you have been continually reframing your role and context as it relates to your EDS challenge, you are most certainly an expert in that regard. You have what learning scientists might call “local expertise.”  Writing the term paper will help you formalize this expertise while the completed paper and the formal review process will provide very direct evidence of that expertise.

Paper Overview

The paper should start with content of the various wikfolios.  You will be pulling together as a coherent paper that would be interesting and helpful for your professional peers.  While you may deviate from this structure, it will likely include the following sections.  Each of these sections should have a second level header (bold, capitalized, on a line by itself)

• Introduction.  An introduction, presumably introducing your EDS challenge and the perspective from which you are writing (note that in APA format there is an implied header at the beginning of the paper called Introduction but the title of the paper goes at the top of the first page. 
• Substantive sections.  Presumably you will have one section for each of the five sections of the course.  This should focus on the most relevant insights from each of the readings as well as the external references and resources that you found.  Your reader should take away a sense of how each of these aspects of EDS is or is not relevant to your challenge.  If a section is truly irrelevant, do your readers a favor by explaining why.  
• Summary and Conclusion.  This should summarize the paper articulate a stance on something. You might simply point to direction for productive work in your area, or you might have something much more specific.

You should be able readily draft each section by starting with cutting and pasting from your wikifolio.  Your consideration of the most relevant practices, concepts, and resources for your aim and role underlies the story that you can now tell.  You are welcome and encouraged to find a peer in your networking group or the class at large and engage in peer review.  

Criteria and Section Suggestions

Here are the minimum requirements for the paper to be accepted.  Included are some suggested guidelines that you might find helpful for this particular paper.

• It must be complete coherent paper, with an appropriate transitions and headings and written in APA format (or some other recognized professional style)
• The paper must contain an appropriate introduction.  This presumably will summarize your context and role as one example of a setting in which assessment is carried out.  This presumably will also summarize your curricular aim as specific context for presenting relevant disciplinary knowledge about assessment.
• The paper must primarily concern the domains of EDS defined by the topics of this course, as it relates to a specific role, issue, or aim.  
• The paper should read like a coherent essay.  Simply cutting and pasting you wikifolios and adding header will not be adequate. It should be clear that you learned more in the process of writing the paper.

Please do not submit incomplete papers.  This course touches on most of the relevant topics in EDS.  But as you are learning they are not all relevant to everyone.  So for example, if you conclude that institutional analysis is not relevant to your challenge, you should explain why.  

Submitting and Grading

Submit your paper by attaching it to this assignment.  You are strongly encouraged to post your paper on a wikifolio page and invite you peers in the class to read and comment.  You are also encouraged to ask a peer to read the paper before submitting it. 

All students can expect personal feedback from the instructor that is commensurate with the effort they put into the paper.  Points will be awarded based on apparent investment of time, corresponding with the class. Given that a 3 credit course represents 180 hours of time (12 hours/week x 15 weeks), each of the 100 points in the class represents approximately 1.8 hours--or approximately two hours.  So if it appears that you spent 10 hours on your paper you can expect it to be worth 5 points.  Most of you will probably need to spend about 20 hours to write a paper that is worth the full ten points.