Creating Assignments that Teach

By Jack Prostko, Director, Faculty Development Center
(Readers are welcome to leave a comment at the end of this article.)

In my September column I discussed the importance of learning goals in designing courses and assessing what Middle States and other accrediting bodies consider to be “learning outcomes.” However one feels about the language of bureaucratic oversight, being clear about one’s goals and making these goals explicit for students creates a better environment for learning (students know what we’re looking for) and a better climate for our teaching methods to be understood (students can, we hope, grasp why we’re doing what we’re doing).
Explaining our learning goals and our standards for reaching those goals can motivate our students. If the purposes of the course are clearly attached to assignments, then students have a reason for fulfilling the assignment beyond the notion of getting an acceptable grade. In the process of teaching toward our goals, feedback is essential in making certain that students are following our explanations, are making sense of the material and are able to use it to complete assigned tasks. Useful strategies for measuring student understanding are Classroom Assessment Techniques–ways of getting ungraded and often anonymous responses to questions about what students understand.
But how about graded assignments? These are the most important part of assessing student learning, and will be the measure of our success in satisfying accreditation requirements and serving our students well.
The most significant question in assessment is what, precisely, is being assessed. Are we asking whether students know what we are talking about? Or are we asking whether they can use what we are talking about? This distinction has been most clearly articulated by Grant Wiggins (1998) when he compares “auditive” assessment and educative assessment. Auditive assessment is backward looking: did the students come to class, get the main idea and reproduce it (in some form) on a mid-term or final? Conceptually, this is assessment as “checking-up”; let’s make sure the work was done and that things stuck.
Educative assessment, however, is an ideal. It is using graded assignments as teaching tools, so that students get more than a grade from the time and effort they put into a project, a paper, or studying for an exam. As Dee Fink describes it, “the primary purpose of educative assessment is to help students learn better” (2003, p. 83).
According to Wiggins, forward-looking assessment (creating assignments that require students to use their knowledge) provides a motivation for learning. “Assessment must be anchored in and focused on authentic tasks because they supply valid direction, intellectual coherence, and motivation for the day-in and day-out work of knowledge and skills development. . . . Assessment is authentic when we anchor testing in the kind of work people do, rather than merely eliciting easy-to-score response to simple questions (1988, p. 21).
What does this mean in practice?
Wiggins and Fink suggest a number of criteria for measuring whether our assignments are educative. Good assignments:

• are realistic
• require judgment and innovation
• ask the student to carry out exploration and work within the discipline
• replicate or simulate the contexts in which adults are tested in the workplace, in civic life and in personal life
• assess the student’s ability to use a repertoire of knowledge and skill efficiently and effectively to negotiate a complex task
• allow appropriate opportunities for students to rehearse, practice, consult resources and get feedback on and refine performances and products (1998, pp. 22, 24; 2003, pp. 86-87).

Undergraduate research opportunities obviously fit these criteria. Research places students in situations that require the application of knowledge and judgment within the context of real-world accountability. But we don’t require extensive research in most of our classes because we can’t. So how do these suggestions translate into what one does in an undergraduate class that may also fulfill a General Education requirement?
Many assignments can be translated into educative assessments with just a bit of work. A review of literature on an issue can be turned into a problem that the review is designed to solve, perhaps as a group project. A set of concepts to be grasped can be related to a case study that sets those concepts in a real world setting. Professors in history, ancient studies and visual arts (for example) frequently require students to visit museums to complete assignments rather than rely on texts or Web sites–and ask that students place the time spent in viewing works in relation to value: what have they learned that could not have been understood without the experience? What do textbooks or Web sites lack that an individual experience produces? And how has this helped the student understand how to view information, art, products of culture, in the future?
Another crucial part of educative assessments is that they ask for peer- and self-critique or reflection. If students are asked to use established criteria or rubrics to exam their peers’ work, they begin to better understand that evaluation and grading aren’t vague or subjective. Students also begin to develop skills that help them better judge the quality of their own work and the processes they must use in order to meet high standards.
Grading may be the least interesting aspect of teaching. But if we think of the process of evaluation as one of providing sets of educational opportunities for students then we are headed in the right direction and making good use of our (and our students’) time and effort.
Resources
Fink, L. Dee. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Fink, L. Dee. Significant Learning Web site: www.ou.edu/idp/significant/index.htm
Wiggins, Grant. (1998). Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.