Deep Dive Into the Annotated Bibliography Assignment
This is meant to be a “deep dive” into an English 102 assignment, from the beginning stages of introducing the topic to the end when I graded students’ work. It strives to document the entire process in detail—sometimes granular detail. I wanted to present as complete a picture of the user experience as I could, both from my perspective and, when possible, my students (or users, if you will.)
Not only am I proud of this work, but I believe it shows my ability to create content to satisfy the three audiences every college professor has:
The students, who are expected to learn and then demonstrate said learning.
The department and school, who provide broad requirements for both students and teachers.
The professor themself, who exists in a hybrid role of coach and judge, depending on the circumstances.
If some of the following is a bit TL;DR, I am including the following links to allow skipping around the document:
And for a more generalized overview of my work in planning, organizing, and running a college class, look at my presentation on an overview of English 102.
English 102 at Wright College was a Composition class that was meant to demonstrate a student’s ability to plan, research, and write at the college level. In accordance with the Illinois Articulation Initiative (IAI) and the rules of the English, Language, and Reading Department, the class culminated with students submitting a research essay of no less than 2500 words. While professors of English 102 had this as a required endpoint, we were given remarkable freedom to design our classes as we saw fit.
With this in mind, I assigned an annotated bibliography for my English 102 students. An annotated bibliography, or “notes on sources” as it roughly translates, tasks students with not only finding sources on a given topic, but also reading, understanding, dissecting, and evaluating their sources. These are invaluable skills when writing research essays, and sadly, skills too often lacking in beginning Wright College students.
1: Annotation Bibliography Description
With all of the prerequisites in mind, I assigned an annotated bibliography for my English 102 students. An annotated bibliography, or “notes on sources” as it roughly translates, tasks students with not only finding sources on a given topic, but also reading, understanding, dissecting, and evaluating their sources. These are invaluable skills when writing research essays, and sadly, skills too often lacking in beginning Wright College students.
Here is a screenshot from the syllabus for my English 102 C class from Fall 2023. It announces and describes the Annotated Bibliography assignment. All assignments—and their corresponding point values—were announced in the syllabus at the beginning of the semester.
According to my schedule, the class was set to begin the Annotated Bibliography section in Week 8, or halfway through a usual 16-week semester. (Fall 2023 happened to be 17 weeks because of a scheduling irregularity.) By the halfway point in the semester, students would have begun thinking about what they would like to research and write about for the rest of the class.
The Annotated Bibliography section began with a lesson on finding and using academic sources. Here is the Week 08 folder from Brightspace, the learning management system (LMS) used by Wright College at the time. This folder would have become available the week before and told students what they had to prepare for class that week.
2: Finding and Using Academic Sources
The handout on Finding and Using Academic Sources was a long one, and it included many screenshots. I am only giving a sample here.
I was intentionally very thorough with this important topic. As I have mentioned, my experience with teaching this class—and with tutoring writing in the school’s writing center—was that many students lacked proficiency in locating, reading, and using sources from academic databases. Independently finding and using these sources was vital to student success in the class, and I wanted to give my users every chance to achieve that success.
3: Introduction
During the following week, Week 9, the class focused more on what an annotated bibliography is and how they were to write one.
The lesson Writing an Annotated Bibliography outlines this process, and Annotated Bibliography - Sample Citation offers a sample citation to help guide students. Both were discussed in class and are offered below in full.
4: Assignment Sheet
In Week 10, students received the actual Annotated Bibliography assignment and learned more about the guidelines of the Modern Language Association (MLA) writing style, which is the type of citation used by most English classes.
For this particular assignment, students had to find four of the seven required sources from an academic database provided by the college. This hopefully ensured that students knew how to use the databases and were finding quality sources for this research. It also gave me the ability to easily find and consult these sources myself when it came time to assess.
Still, I wanted to be sure to allow creativity and opportunity, and honestly, some of the best sources might be found outside of an academic database. For example, books, personal interviews, and relevant YouTube videos could be perfect sources for a research paper. Because of this, three of the seven sources could be “non-academic” sources.
Of particular importance to any student was when an assignment was due and how many points (or whatever grading system is employed) the assignment was worth. I was always careful to visually highlight this information on my assignment sheets to be sure my users found it easily.
I also provided resources for help in completing the assignment. Apart from the rubric—discussed later—these links and information were nothing new. Still, I liked to provide these again for ease of access.
I will talk about MLA later—first, here is a view of the Annotated Bibliography assignment sheet on Brightspace.
At the beginning of my assignment sheets, I liked to give a brief overview of the aims of the assignment, something I do not think was always emphasized enough in my colleagues’ work. My thinking was that my students were more likely to deliver superior work if they had a better understanding of why it was being expected of them in the first place.
Next, I go into detail about the rules of the assignment, what my expectations were, and how assignments were to be assessed. My experience also taught me to be precise and transparent with my guidelines. I found this practice to be successful for my three audiences: my students, who knew exactly what was required and how their work would be judged, my department, who could see that academic standards were being met, and myself, who had to grade the assignment at the end of the process, something made easier by the introduction of a clear framework in the beginning.
5: Student View vs. Teacher View
It is worth noting that the above documents, as well of the rest of the previous documents, showed what students saw: “student view.” Below, we have screenshots of what the assignment sheet looked like from my end, offering a glimpse of my development from what Brightspace called the “teacher view.”
Here, we can see how professors created standard html files in Brightspace: Edit HTML File. The options for this include the ordinary font and paragraph options to inserting links, tables, and pictures. I stayed away from document templates and some of the flashier options in favor of simple text and clear organization of ideas. In this, I was influenced not only in experience of reading or assigning thousands of assignment sheets in my time as a student, teacher, and tutor, but also by the mandates of Universal Design. I wanted my assignments and other communications to be easy to decipher and accessible to as many people as possible.
6: How to Submit the Assignment
Next, here is a screenshot of the assignment link for the Annotated Bibliography. This is where students would submit their assignments on Brightspace.
This link was found in the folders for Weeks 10 and 11 and was important because students used it to submit their assignments on Brightspace. Along with the submission link itself, I gave links back to the assignment sheet, discussed above, as well as the rubric, which is a table that shows how a student would be graded based a number of categories. That rubric is also found in the screenshot.
At the bottom of the assignment link, students attached a Word document or PDF when prompted, and their end of the process was complete.
This is the Brightspace interface that was used to create assignments. (Please note that the next two pages are actually the same page on the software. The page has drop down menus and was designed to scroll, and this made it behave badly for screenshots.)
On the left side, we see inputs for the name of the assignment, how many points were available, if the points should directly count to the overall grade (Grade Book), the due date and time, and a box for Instructions. I discuss the instructions in more depth below.
On the right side of the page, we see the first drop-down menu: Availability Dates & Conditions. This is where I controlled when the assignment was made available to students with “Start Date,” and there were other conditions and rules that I usually left blank.
In some ways, choosing a start date for an assignment is just as important as selecting a launch date for a service or app. Obviously, you need to give students enough time to complete an assignment, and no app should be released before it is ready. But there is also such a thing as having too much time to work on an assignment. Teachers want a “sweet spot” where students have enough time to complete their work but not so much time that they get distracted, procrastinate, and/or forget how to apply what they have learned in class.
This shows a second view of that same page, this time with the Evaluation & Feedback drop-down menu. Here, I attached the rubric for the assignment, which is a visual representation of exactly how the assignment would be graded. More on that below.
Lastly, here is a teacher’s view of the rubric I created for the Annotated Bibliography. My goal for every rubric was to create the conditions for transparent, fair, and consistent assessment.
When writing my assignments, I found that a triangulation method worked best for me when writing rubrics. The language used on the instructions for the assignment were mirrored in the categories of the rubric, and that language was carried over in the written comments I would make on graded papers when offering suggestions for future improvements. This consistency and transparency served both my students and me.
7: MLA Citation
Going back a few steps, English 102 went over the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style at this point in the class. The “bibliography” half of the Annotated Bibliography was satisfied by documenting necessary information on their sources. Learning and practicing MLA was crucial because proper credit needs to be given to all sources, a skill that too many of my Composition students lacked coming into English 102.
MLA can be very precise—some would say picky and cantankerous!—and it can be just as much a challenge to teach as it is to use in papers. One of the issues is that different media (web articles, newspapers, books) are cited differently. Another problem is the precise formatting.
I viewed MLA—and citation in general—as an important aspect of the class, but I was also aware of how tedious it could be for most students. Instead of intending my MLA documents as lessons to be memorized, I meant them more as guides to quickly go over and reference as needed.
As such we would spend time throughout the rest of the semester returning to the various rules of MLA, especially as it pertained to different forms of media. I am not including all of my MLA documents here, but I do offer the first one, MLA Basic Rules and Sample Works Cited, as an example.
As always with my documents meant for students, I wanted this to be a mixture of approachable and detail-oriented. I also took pains when collecting documents into folders on Brightspace, so I always favored logical organization and clear links posted in multiple locations.
For example, here are screenshots of the Annotated Bibliography Resources and MLA Resources folders, both found under Content > Course Resources on Brightspace:
8: Submitting the Assignment
Week 11 saw this English 102 class wrapping up the Annotated Bibliography section of the course. We spent that week practicing writing citations as a class and generally addressing any last questions.
As you can see in the screenshot for Week 11, students received the assignment for the first part of the Final Research Essay—the semester-ending final project worth 35% of the overall grade—before the Annotated Bibliography was due. While I did not want to overwhelm or distract them from completing the Annotated Bibliography that week, the pace of the class dictated the schedule. I wanted to give students as much time as possible to complete the final essay, so they needed to at least be aware of what was coming.
9: Evaluating the Assignment
Soon enough, the due date for the Annotated Bibliography came and went, and it came time for me to read the assignments.
Screenshots from the Brightspace LMS allow me to present some views of the assessment process. However, great care needs to be taken with this, and in keeping with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), student names and other identifying information are redacted.
In the first screenshot, we can see the beginning of the rubric and the choices I made for the first two categories: “Summary” and “Evaluation.” In the second, “Overall Grade” shows my assessment, and “Overall Feedback” shows the beginning of my written comments, as described below.
Here is the submissions page for the Annotated Bibliography assignment for this English 102 class. On this page, Brightspace showed me a list of students in the class, who submitted the assignment, when they submitted it, information about the file that was submitted, and any comments left by the students themselves when submitting.
Clicking on individual students’ submissions brought up an evaluation page. The submissions themselves were accessed here and opened in a new window. There was also a separate link for Turnitin evaluation, as described above.
On this page, I could access the rubric I programmed for the assignment and grade each category by clicking on the appropriate box. While reading through a long assignment can be time-consuming, this rubric system made grading much easier.
Here is a sample evaluation page. (Again, Brightspace was being uncooperative with the screenshot, so I had to cut it up into two pictures. Keep in mind that on the actual page, I was able to scroll through the entire rubric.)
10: Written Comments
For all of my assignments, I left written comments for each student based on their overall score and performance in each category. I had a few distinct goals for my written comments. My teaching philosophy evolved into thinking of this as writing about the “past, present, and future.”
The past represented the assignment to me. It was over, and I needed to explain to students how they were being assessed. I found this to be a vital part of teaching at the college level, where the stress of grades and the weight they carry can be great. Again, transparency and consistency were the keys.
In the present, I wanted to encourage and “pump up” the students. If the assignment was great, I said so and was not sparing in my praise. If it was not good, I said that too, but I focused on ways to improve for next time. Either way, this followed the “coaching” aspect of a college professor that I found too often went unnoticed—in students and professors!
For the future, I offered detailed suggestions on how to improve on the problems I found. This would hopefully improve their writing at a general level, but it had a more immediate goal: I often gave students the opportunity to revise their work for a higher grade. In my comments, I gave specific feedback on how to improve based on each of the categories found in the rubric.
In my early years as a college professor, I found the task of leaving written comments to be laborious and overwhelming. I noticed that I was repeating myself often, seeing the same issues in different students’ essays and repeating the same exact words. Also, I was still literally writing on the paper copies my students were handing in, so I was dealing with space limitations and my horrendous handwriting!
An obvious fix for my handwriting was leaving typed comments on the LMS. Once I did so, I found my copying and pasting certain text when I found the same issues in different students, personalizing the language as needed. From there, I asked myself if I could do this for all the grading I did, and the answer was that I could!
11: Templates
I developed templates for written comments for all of my assignments. These comments were based on the grades students were getting and the common difficulties I saw with writing at this level. It helped me greatly, doing wonders for my productivity and consistency. It allowed me to fully triangulate the language from the assignment sheet, rubric, and written comments.
I offer a sample of my Annotated Bibliography written comments template below. These comments come from what I would leave in the beginning of my feedback, or the “Overall” category.
Excellent – No issues (100%)
Your theme for this assignment was <?>. And it was great! Everything—selection of sources, Summary, Evaluation, Value to Student, MLA—is excellent. This is well-organized and thorough, and it is an effort you should be proud of!
After completing this assignment, I hope you see how an Annotated Bibliography could be vital to writing a research essay. Not only did this assignment give you practice for finding relevant sources on a particular topic, but it also showed you a blueprint for how to write ABOUT sources inside an essay. Each source you use in an essay should be summarized, evaluated, and directly connected to your thesis, and that is exactly what the annotations were about. As such, whole sentences of an annotation could be copied and pasted into an essay!
Excellent – Some issues (99-90%)
Your theme for this assignment was <?>. And it was great! Most of this was excellent: <selection of sources, Summary, Evaluation, Value to Student, MLA>. I did find some issues with <?>. Still, was a great effort that you should be proud of!
After completing this assignment, I hope you see how an Annotated Bibliography could be vital to writing a research essay. Not only did this assignment give you practice for finding relevant sources on a particular topic, but it showed you a blueprint for how to write ABOUT sources inside an essay. Each source you use in an essay should be summarized, evaluated, and directly connected to your thesis, and that is exactly what the annotations were about. As such, whole sentences of an annotation could be copied and pasted into an essay!
Good (89-80%)
Your theme for this assignment was <?>. I found this to be good overall, but there were some issues that kept it out of the “excellent” category. Still, your <excellent categories> are all great here.
After completing this assignment, I hope you see how an Annotated Bibliography could be vital to writing a research essay. Not only did this assignment give you practice for finding relevant sources on a particular topic, but it also showed you a blueprint for how to write ABOUT sources inside an essay. Each source you use in an essay should be summarized, evaluated, and directly connected to your thesis, and that is exactly what the annotations were about. As such, whole sentences of an annotation could be copied and pasted into an essay!
Poor (Under 79%)
Your theme for this assignment was <?>. You have a good theme here, but there were multiple issues that kept this from scoring higher. <?>
After completing this assignment, I hope you see how vital an Annotated Bibliography could be to writing a research essay. Not only did this assignment give you practice for finding relevant sources on a particular topic, but it also showed you a blueprint for how to write ABOUT sources inside an essay. Each source you use in an essay should be summarized, evaluated, and directly connected to your thesis, and that is exactly what the annotations were about. As such, whole sentences of an annotation could be copied and pasted into an essay!
Penalty for only SIX valid entries
According to the instructions for this assignment, “any annotated bibliography with only SIX valid entries will receive an automatic 50-point penalty.” Unfortunately, <EXPLAIN>
Automatic fail – FIVE or fewer valid entries
According to the instructions for this assignment, “…any annotated bibliography with only FIVE valid entries will receive an automatic ZERO.” Unfortunately, your sources fall short of this requirement. <EXPLAIN>
Automatic fail – fewer than FOUR entries from a CCC database
According to the instructions for this assignment, “FOUR of the entries MUST come from a library database that can be accessed using the CCC library system.” Unfortunately, your sources fall short of this requirement. <EXPLAIN>
Automatic Fail – Plagiarism
Turnitin found very clear instances of plagiarism. As discussed in class, and reinforced during the Plagiarism Activity, that is considered CHEATING in this class.
As your syllabus says, “ANY STUDENT CAUGHT CHEATING ON AN ASSIGNMENT WILL AUTOMATICALLY RECEIVE A SCORE OF ZERO ON THAT ASSIGNMENT. IF THAT STUDENT IS CAUGHT CHEATING A SECOND TIME DURING THE SEMESTER, THEY WILL AUTOMATICALLY FAIL THE CLASS.”
If you have further questions about this, please do not hesitate to ask me. I am always available via email, during office hours, or after class.
12: Grades
Finally, the Annotated Bibliography project was completed when students received their grades and written comments on Brightspace. This is a screenshot of what this looked like from the student’s view.
Once the assessment has been delivered, the process of an assignment comes to an end. This screenshot shows the student’s view of the overall grade, how the assignment was scored using the rubric, and my written comments. Obviously, not everyone received perfect scores for their Annotated Bibliographies! This was an example of a student who completed all of the requirements in an outstanding manner.
Thanks for reading!