Roberta-- It seems to me that a co-op report is like any other kind of assignment--it's relevance lies in the way in which it is integrated into the educational experience, and the way the audience for it is constructed. I'm the co-op rep for communications studies, and I run into this relevance problem a lot. I haven't exactly solved it, but here's what I have done to try to ameliorate it. Students are discouraged from writing purely informative what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation reports. Rather, they are encouraged to find areas of the organization that they can investigate and recommend on. Sometimes it's their own co-op experience: they recommend ways to make their own job better for the next person. Sometimes they get at things that are not directly part of their jobs but which they see hapening at work. That is, they undertake an original investigation of some aspect of the workplace and write a report with recommendations and conclusions. Sometimes these sit on the shelf, but there is the chance that by seeing things with a totally fresh gaze they can say things that will be genuinely of interest to the company. Sometimes they write informative reports that are essentially manuals for their successors. They try to get at what they wish they had known at the beginning but took four months to find out, and write that down in instructio-manual form. Sometimes their work term _is_ essentially a report. They produce something in the norml course of events. In this event, they repackage it so that an outsider (me) can get a grip on what they've been doing. This gets to be quite an exercise in rhetorical audience adaptation. I articulate the purpose of the report as being to learn how to write professional prose. Most of them turn in a thinly disguised academic essay as their first report--long blocks of prose, discovery structure, little understanding of what goes in an executive summary, an implied assumption that the reader will read right through from the beginning to the end, etc. By the time they write their fourth report these assumptions have been replaced with professional-reader assumptions. And of course, the important thing is to do exactly what we do in composition classes: treat the report as a process, not an add-on that's tacked on the end. They submit a proposal part way through, and we talk about it. When things go the way I want them to, they submit their proposals a month before I have to have my marks in, I read them right away _as drafts_, and get back to them with requests for changes. It's an integrated learning process. (When things aren't going the way I want, I get busy, mark them at the last minute and don't give them time for redrafting, but that's another story. Let's stick to the way things are _supposed_ to go.) In short, the reports are a way of teaching the students how to enter a discourse community by learning to work with prose that embodies the assumptions of that community (now where have we heard talk like that before)? Some still complain about irrelevance, but we can't win 'em all. I'll send you privately my handout for students that explains some of this. I wrote it a long time ago, and as I read what I just said, I see ways that I could rewrite to embody some of that more clearly, but here it is anyway. References: <[log in to unmask]>