This morning my T Th class did their "main point" presentations and most of them focused on "cheating in school".
Just to clarify, the "main point" speaking activity is a partial speech assignment. I have them create a single main point and find statistics and a story to support it. They choose one of four main points from a speech about cheating. I started using this as a speaking assignment when I had to start generating data about student learning outcomes for our accreditation. So I had to get all rubricized and quantitative.
Anyway, I love this assignment because it helps them work with research AND visual aids and trains them to give the source of their research. ALSO, because of the topic they focus on, it gets them thinking about the ethics of the American people...which, statistically, are pretty questionable. Most interesting statistic came from the 2001 McCabe, Trevino, Butterfield study on Cheating in Institutions http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/plagiarism/docs/McCabe_et_al.pdf
This assignment also gives them another opportunity to speak and this morning they seemed less nervous and lots more energetic.
I like this class.
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