Public Health 101
Imagine you work for the Maryland Department of Health. Your supervisor asks you to produce an “issue brief” on the current state of smoking and associated health problems in Maryland, as part of your team’s effort to create an updated list of public health priorities for the state. First, you will need to locate and access relevant data on the prevalence and health impacts of smoking across the state. To produce a report that meets your boss’s expectations, you will also need to familiarize yourself with the genre of the brief. Synthesizing the data you have found, you create a 5-page report, organized with headings and subheadings, including figures and accompanying text that describe the epidemiology of this public health problem.
Introduction to Public Health
This is the scenario that students inhabit for their initial assignment in Maria Bulzacchelli’s writing-intensive Introduction to Public Health, a core course in the Public Health Studies Major.
The course emphasizes skills that public health professionals use on the job, including identifying and synthesizing credible sources of data, evaluating and comparing findings, and communicating one’s findings in a professional context. As the “issue brief” assignment demonstrates, the audience, genre, and purpose of writing tasks are defined to create authentic assessments: one in which students apply course concepts to plausible real-world scenarios.
Over the course of the semester, students develop expertise in a public health issue (they choose between smoking or obesity) and continue to develop their voice as a public health practitioner. They follow the issue brief with an annotated bibliography in assignment two assessing the strength of evidence supporting a given risk factor’s association with disease; and finally, assignment three has an evaluation of two proposed policies to tackle the problem.
Real-life Models
To help students succeed in writing in a new disciplinary and professional context, students are provided with real-life models and guidance. For example, they review issue briefs on other topics, and look at the CDC’s guidelines for writing briefs. Weekly written responses to lab exercises allow students to practice the concepts and skills they need for the major assignments in a lower-stakes setting where they can get supports from peers and instructional staff.
Specifications-based grading, an alternative assessment method, creates an environment where students learn from their mistakes without being punished for initial failures: writing assignments are evaluated on a satisfactory/ unsatisfactory basis, with the final grade determined by the number of satisfactorily completed assignments. Students receive feedback on major assignments and can revise and resubmit if they do not achieve a satisfactory on their first attempt, a policy explained in the syllabus.