When students are asked to develop their research skills, this usually includes developing their skills of an analysis, comparison, evaluation and sometimes also of theory application, which are among the most complex cognitive skills. This is why teachers often use research papers as learning and assessment tools. However, experience shows that writing a solid research paper is quite difficult for many students, and particularly for those who are asked to complete this task for the first time.
This paper will discuss two approaches for teaching a course where developing students’ analytical skills is among the desired learning outcomes. These strategies include a) allowing students to choose their final assessment task and b) assigning the task to students based on their earlier performance. These two tasks are asking students to answer questions on a written exam (a less complex task) and asking students to write a research paper on the topic of their choice (a more demanding task). The author will evaluate the results of these two approaches based on her two-year experience while teaching a course on relations between China and Central Europe. She has found the strategy of assigning a task to students more effective as it has resulted in more students submitting good quality research papers than when students voluntarily opted for writing a research paper. When deciding which students should be allowed to write a research paper, quality of their research paper proposal appeared as an optimal indicator. Related to this, offering feedback to students’ draft proposals was found to be important for helping students to prepare good quality proposals/papers. Other strategies discussed in the literature will be mentioned, too.
