Recap: Infusing Purpose in the Classroom with Transparent Assignment Design

Photo by Lena Taranenko on Unsplash

Last month, CETL facilitated a workshop on transparent assignment design, a framework built on research from the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project. I (Emily) personally believe that one of the lowest-effort, highest-reward changes instructors can make to their pedagogy is to make their teaching choices and course assignments more transparent. Let me explain why.

The Research

Mary-Ann Winkelmes and her team have studied transparency in the college classroom extensively. Among other things, they’ve found that making just two assignments more transparent in a class can increase three important predictors of student success: academic confidence, sense of belonging, and improved mastery of skills that employers value. In the study linked above, all students benefited from increased transparency, though the effects were particularly strong for students who have been historically underrepresented in higher ed.

More transparent teaching has also been shown to increase student retention. Researchers found that at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, students who took more transparent courses were more likely to be retained from year to year. To be precise, transparency increased first-year retention by 15.5%.

The best part is that enhancing transparency in the classroom doesn’t necessarily require instructors to make huge changes to their teaching; it’s mostly a matter of clear communication.

In last month’s workshop, we introduced a framework that can help us promote transparency by making small changes to our assignments. Transparent assignment design has three components:

1. Purpose

2. Task

3. Criteria

I’ll explain each below.

Purpose

To my mind, “purpose” is the most important component here. One of the biggest challenges facing higher education in this moment is that students and teachers alike are struggling to maintain a sense of purpose. For many students, college feels like a transaction: they’re here to get a grade so they can get a degree so they can get a job. Any learning that happens along the way is mostly incidental. I don’t blame students for this; it’s basically the message they’ve been receiving about college since they were children.

But students are hungry for purpose. They want to know why they’re learning things. And sure, part of that is knowing how an assignment will prepare them for the next test, help them get a job, or promote success in a job once they get it. But they also have more philosophical questions. Why do people learn these things at all? What function does this learning serve beyond the walls of the classroom?

Understanding the purpose of class assignments and activities can provide the kind of motivation students need to engage in the difficult work of learning. Studies have even shown that giving students a “self-transcendent purpose for learning”—i.e., a motivation that transcends self-interest and taps into a larger desire to do good in the world—can help foster academic self-regulation, enhancing students’ ability to persist through tedious or unpleasant academic tasks. Who doesn’t want that?

In the transparent assignment design framework, clarifying purpose involves two things: showing students what knowledge they’ll gain from completing an assignment and what skills they’ll build throughout the process. It’s important that we think about knowledge and skills here in the long term. What will students know and be able to do in five, ten, or even twenty years as a result of engaging in the work of your class?

The “purpose” statements in the transparent assignments on the TILT website emphasize a wide variety of outcomes, highlighting the ways in which students will be different as a result of completing the assignment along with where they might see the knowledge and skills they’re building in the “real world”:

• From Communications: “The purpose of this assignment is to help you make an informed decision about the major/career you are considering.”

• From Psychology: “The purpose of this activity is to help you monitor how your beliefs change throughout the semester.”

• From Science 101: “As a result of completing this assignment, you will be able to identify the sources of scientific information, interpret the results, and critically analyze the scientific merit of the conclusion of an existing scientific poster.”

• From Algebra: “This assignment will help prepare you for simplifying expressions from calculus and help you communicate where your understandings and misunderstandings are…Real-life modeling problems are everywhere such as modeling the spread of COVID-19 or predicting future global temperatures.”

And from an assignment in my own literature course:

• “The purpose of writing this piece is to help you explore, and articulate to others, all the reasons why we should still read pre-modern literature in the modern world—and to build your skills in close reading and analysis along the way.”

It may seem, at first, that the purpose of the work we’re doing in our classes is self-evident. But students don’t always understand why we ask them to complete certain kinds of assignments, beyond the fact that such assignments are required for their grade. We ourselves don’t always have a good grasp on why we’re doing what we’re doing—at least until we try to explain it to ourselves and our students.

That’s what’s so great about considering purpose: it can help us refocus on what really matters in our courses and help us better explain to students why it matters. Plus, it only takes a few minutes to write a purpose paragraph for our assignment sheets and to review it with students during class. If you haven’t done this already, it’s a good place to start!

Task

The second component of transparent assignment design is “task”: that means explaining to students what to do and how to do it. I know we all think we’re already doing this—that’s the main point of an assignment sheet, after all. But a colleague at another institution, Tolulope Noah, recently shared a comparison that might help us think about some gaps in our understanding here.

Have you ever seen the show Schitt’s Creek? There’s a pretty famous scene in it where the decidedly un-domestic character David and his equally unprepared mother, Moira, are trying to make enchiladas.

They come to a step in the recipe that instructs them to “fold in the cheese.” David has no idea what this could possibly mean. How do you “fold” cheese? “Fold,” like, in half? Moira is also clueless. Unable to explain the process, she just keeps instructing David to “fold it in.” As they go back and forth, they become increasingly frustrated—to hilarious effect—with the recipe and with each other.

This sometimes happens with our students, too. We tell them to “fold it in,” assuming that this process will be self-evident, but they don’t always have the background knowledge to understand what to do.

Explaining the steps required to complete a task can help bridge these gaps. If there are particular ways you want students to go about their assignment, write them down and make sure students understand them.

It may be that, for your particular assignment, clarifying the exact steps defeats the purpose of the work. Maybe part of your goal is for students to develop their own unique approach to the task as a way of building problem-solving skills or creativity. If that’s the case, simply explain this to students when you explain the “purpose” of the assignment. Students should know that struggling to devise their approach is part of the learning; otherwise, they may assume that they aren’t advanced enough to successfully complete the assignment.

In most cases, however, explaining the task to students more precisely can help minimize logistical struggles so they can focus on the intellectual struggles—the parts of the assignment that promise the real learning.

Criteria

The final component of transparent assignment design is “criteria.” Clarifying the criteria, first, means providing a checklist, rubric, or other guide that you’ll use to evaluate student work. It’s important that students are able to review the evaluation criteria before beginning the assignment so that they understand the expectations.

I think there’s a general misconception that such criteria are only useful for tasks that are assessed more subjectively, like essays or presentations. But even work that has right or wrong answers, like problem sets in math, may be awarded partial credit—suggesting that the instructor has some specific evaluation criteria in mind, even when it’s not clearly articulated. Criteria for an algebra assignment, for example, might look something like this:

A second part of clarifying criteria for students is providing samples of successful work—ideally annotated ones. For example, you might share high-scoring assignments of previous students (with their permission), along with some commentary on what makes that work so good. If you don’t have previous student work to draw on, you might create your own samples.

Another option would be to provide real-world examples of the work you’re asking students to do, examples created by actual professionals. This may not work for every class. But if none of the assignments you ask your students to complete mirror real-world tasks, you might consider incorporating more authentic assessment into your courses to help students better understand the significance of the knowledge and skills they’re building within it.

An Ongoing Conversation

Transparent assignment design, as a framework, focuses on crafting an assignment sheet or explaining assignments to students before they begin the work. But we can’t always anticipate the things students will need once they get underway or the ways that they will receive our recommendations. As Sarah Silverman reminds us,

“Making expectations explicit should probably be seen as a process and dialogue between instructors and students, rather than a one-time practice or statement at the top of an assignment sheet…This may require some level of tolerance for error and misunderstanding, a natural feature of human communication that we can never head off completely.”

No matter how transparent your assignment, questions or misunderstandings may still arise. Make sure to keep the lines of communication open as students continue to work on their assignments.

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It’s almost April, which means CETL workshops are winding down for the semester. But we’re always available to talk about teaching! If you’d like to schedule a one-on-one conversation to debrief your spring class, plan for your fall one, or discuss any other teaching-related matter, you can request a consultation here.