This assignment asks students to identify a central or highly significant paradigm of their discipline, describe how it functions to create problem-solving strategies, and describe the paradigm that it has replaced, gathering information from both interviews and library sources.

This assignment asks students to evaluate major library and Internet resources in their fields for an audience of other students who are new to the field.

This assignment asks students to research and discuss the most (or one of the most) exciting, potentially revolutionary, cutting-edge developments in their field.

This assignment calls for students to investigate a particular disaster (or at least a severe problem) in their field caused by miscommunication or lack of communication. It works well as an initial assignment in a technical writing course with students from several different disciplines.

This assignment asks students to research using a number of different sources and to present their research in a multimodal fashion, from a number of different perspectives. It works well as either an initial or a final assignment in research-intensive courses, and/or as an online project.

Suitable for classes in gender studies, marketing, mass communication, sociology, rhetoric, and English studies, this assignment asks students to research a particular product that is sold as "for men" or "for women" as a means of answering the question, "What might we learn about the way consumer products work if we consider gender as an act, a performance, a set of codes and costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity?"