Imagine you work for the Maryland Department of Health. Your supervisor asks you to produce an \u201cissue brief\u201d on the current state of smoking and associated health problems in Maryland, as part of your team\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the scenario that students inhabit for their initial assignment<\/a> in Maria Bulzacchelli\u2019s writing-intensive Introduction to Public Health, a core course in the Public Health Studies Major. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s findings in a professional context. As the \u201cissue brief\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> assessing the strength of evidence supporting a given risk factor\u2019s association with disease; and finally, assignment three<\/a> has an evaluation of two proposed policies to tackle the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s guidelines for writing briefs. Weekly written responses to lab exercises<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Specifications-based grading, an alternative assessment method<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Introduction to Public Health, students complete writing projects that mirror the on-the-job demands of public health professionals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2189,"parent":0,"template":"","project_type":[165],"class_list":["post-2228","ksasresearchprojects","type-ksasresearchprojects","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","project_type-social-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ksasresearchprojects\/2228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ksasresearchprojects"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ksasresearchprojects"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ksasresearchprojects\/2228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2562,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ksasresearchprojects\/2228\/revisions\/2562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/writing-program\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=2228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Real-life Models<\/h2>\n\n\n\n