You know how many times it can take to get a new assignment just right. You get too many questions the first time, but when you add more information the next time, the class is overwhelmed. Or maybe the final products aren’t what you were expecting at all, and you find you have to add a week of conferencing time to offer feedback on drafts. And while it’s true that practice makes perfect, in the meantime it means that the great assignment idea you had begins to sour on you. You may give it up altogether, or have to adjust your grading approach to address the real deficiencies in the assignment. 

But what if there was a way to avoid–or at least lessen–the learning curve we often face with new assignments? A way that not only led to better student artifacts, but to better, more sustained student learning and satisfaction? Here are five additions to any assignment prompt that will do just that. 

1. Identify the Why (and Who)

Purpose and audience. You’ve probably considered both when creating a new assignment. Most likely, the purpose is to meet a particular learning objective for the course. You are evaluating your students’ learning of a skill or body of knowledge. Research has shown that articulating that purpose to students increases academic confidence and students’ sense of belonging (Willingham-McLain, 2017). It’s often difficult for students to see how course assignments connect to course learning goals. Transparent assignment design principles, like adding a purpose statement to your assignment, seek to remedy that. 

Identifying an audience is equally important. Students typically assume their audience is their professor, and are therefore trying to appeal to their professors when creating their submissions. How might bringing awareness to a different audience change the outcome of the assignment? For instance, how might an audience of elementary school students change a podcast assignment on virus transmission? How might students have to rethink language, tone, and context? Even if you aren’t planning on changing the audience of your assignment, simply bringing awareness to what the audience needs are will help students think critically about important elements like tone, style, and diction. 

2. Break it down

We’ve seen a great push in recent years of faculty moving towards more authentic and engaging assignments, often utilizing multimedia tools, peer review, and group assignments. This is a positive development: student engagement and learning improve with authentic assessments (Wiggins, 2019). However, as we move to make our assignments more authentic and engaging for our students, it is important to empower students with the tools they need to complete these assignments successfully. 

Let’s take peer review, for example. We know the benefits of peer review in a variety of writing and project-based assignments and that it is an important element in scaffolding a complex assignment. But often students and instructors both complain that student peers are not motivated or prepared enough to provide useful feedback on drafts. Here is an instance where it is not enough to simply scaffold in a peer review activity. To make it successful, we have to provide students with the language and guidance they need to identify issues in each other’s work, and to know what they’ll be assessed on. Look at an example draft together. Explain to students what you see, and what you would comment on the sample. Adding a peer review rubric can also help here, with targeted questions that are specific to the individual assignment. 

Scaffolding, then, is not just meant to break an assignment into smaller, more easily managed parts. It is also about scaffolding the processes students will undergo, and skills they need, to complete the assignment. 

3. Make time to activate prior knowledge

Activating prior knowledge means to take inventory about what you already know about a topic. This activity is an important building block to learning, and when we make time for it in the classroom, it becomes an engaging, collaborative learning tool. Students with prior knowledge are able to help novice learners bridge difficult gaps in context that can slow down learning. 

Including an activity that activates prior knowledge at the start of a new unit, topic, or major reading assignment. For upper-level courses, this could also be used as an icebreaker activity at the beginning of the term. 

Here are a few example activities for activating prior knowledge:

• Question of the day: An open-ended question projected on the screen at the start of class. Students are given a few minutes to reflect on the question. Return to it later and have students share answers. 
• Forecasting: A useful tool to introduce a book, film, or other longer work. Students make predictions based on what they already know and what they’ve read or seen before. Return to this activity regularly as you work your way through the assignment, and analyze previous predictions.
• Graphic Organizers: Have students fill out a K-W-L chart. Here, students think about what they K(now), what they W(ant to learn), and what they have L(earned). It’s a useful tool to restructure learning as a discovery process rather than a search for the “right” answer, so it is often used at the start of a research project.

For more information, see our earlier teaching tip on the topic. 
 

4. Provide options 

When possible, acknowledge that students have varied skill sets and interests, and they may be more successful when given the opportunity to demonstrate their learning in a different way. How can you accomplish this? Provide an alternative version of the assignment. For instance, perhaps you are assigning students a research poster. Consider assigning a webpage or video essay as an alternative. All three can be used to assess the same research and organization skills, but students have the flexibility to choose the format that works for them, an important element in engaging cognition (CAST, 2018).  

5. Require reflection   

Metacognition is often thought of as “thinking about one’s thinking.” Research shows that students with strong metacognitive skills are both more effective and more efficient learners (Dangremond Stanton et al., 2021). While some of us may be more comfortable with metacognitive activities, most students will benefit from direct instruction on how and why they should make time to reflect on their thinking and approach to an assignment. Consider adding a brief reflection statement requirement to your assignments, with guiding questions:

• What interested you? Why?
• What was the most surprising thing you learned? 
• Where did you struggle, and why do you think you had difficulty with that element?
• How does this work connect to other things you’ve read, created, or experienced?
• If you had to complete this assignment over again, what would you change? 
•  

Interested in getting more support in assignment design? Request a consultation with an LSA Instructional Consultant for help.

References:

CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. http://udlguidelines.cast.org

Dangremond Stanton, J., Sebesta, A. J., & Dunlosky, J. Fostering metacognition to support student learning and performance. CBE–Life Sciences Education, 20(2). https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-12-0289

Graphic organizer. (2024). Read write think. https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/printouts/chart-0

Tilt higher ed. TILT Higher Ed. (n.d.). https://tilthighered.com/ 

Wiggins, G. (2019). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.7275/ffb1-mm19

Willingham-McLain, L. (2017, December 8). Just a TAD – Transparent assignment design. The flourishing academic. https://flourishingacademic.wordpress.com/2017/12/08/just-a-tad-transparent-assignment-design/