Chapter 5. Creating Assignments

In this chapter, we offer ideas on how to begin to create meaningful assignments that are well integrated into the goals of the course.

Chapter Outline

Scaffolding

• Examples of Scaffolded Assignments for Various Disciplines
• Scaffolded Writing Assignments (Interdisciplinary)

Setting Up a Gradebook

Flexibility in Your Course

As you plan your course, think about what role assignments will play. Some questions to consider:

• How will your assignments promote student learning? How will they connect to the learning goals of your course?
• Will you use assignments to assess your students’ comprehension of course material (as in an exam or quiz) and/or will some assignments give students the opportunity to problematize, and eventually synthesize course material?
• Will your assignments provide lower-stakes scaffolding for work that builds towards a higher-stakes culminating assignment or project?
• Will you vary the types of assignments you’ll require? If so, how will you decide what to assign and when?
• How might secondary course objectives inform your assignment design? (If you’re interested in students working with technology in the classroom, for instance, could you design an assignment that makes use of the technology you’re exploring?)
• If you’re breaking your course into modules or units, might it be beneficial to think about assignments in terms of micro (unit-specific) goals, and macro ones that ask students to make connections across units?
• How will you represent these assignments on your course syllabus? One option is to include a three-column table that lists, in the first column, the date; in the second column, the reading due; and, in the third column, assignments due. Another option is to include a table or list of key due dates on your syllabus. Since you want your syllabus to be a manageable document, consider passing out or posting assignment-specific instructions in a separate document.

As you design assignments, keep in mind how you’ll calculate grades:

• What percentage of the course grade do you want the major assignments (exams, papers, projects, etc.) to be?
• How will you balance those with other coursework such as homework, participation, presentations, attendance, etc.?
• What other categories should have weight in determining the final grade?
• How will you assess and factor in attendance, participation and late work?
• Are your course policies in-line with department and college policies? Remember, not all campuses have the same policies (particularly around attendance) so make sure you check!

Once you have your big category numbers, begin to break them down. So, if papers are 20 percent of the final course grade and you have four of them, do you want each to be 5 percent, or will they be weighted progressively more as students learn and build on new skills?

Think, too, about your assignment return rule:

• Are you planning on returning papers the next time you meet?
• If so, does it help if you have the weekend to grade? Or do you want to avoid weekend grading?
• Do the students need feedback on the assignment before completing the next homework?

For more about grading and assessment methods, see the chapter on “Grading and Evaluating Student Work” in this handbook.

Scaffolding

In assignment design, scaffolding refers to a process where assignments begin with a series of low-stakes (low grade impact) exercises which build up to a final, larger assignment. Scaffolding allows you to break down the component parts of a skill or assignment and to offer students the opportunity to check in and receive feedback at each juncture. In this way, scaffolding is both a planning and learning tool and follows a similar process to backwards design to consider what a student needs to know in order to complete a task or assignment. For many students, especially those who are not familiar with what goes into larger academic assignments, it is very important to make potential structures and processes for completing larger projects more visible. Modeling that building academic work is an iterative process can help students tackle more complex projects later on in their careers.

Sequencing large assignments into manageable building blocks also opens up the learning process for both instructor and student. You might begin with ideation or brainstorming by asking students to create mind maps, identify a few sources, or create an outline and bibliography to build toward the ultimate assignment. Asking students to share drafts with their peers and instructor, give and respond to feedback, and revise and refine their work lets them reflect on their own process of knowledge making. It’s through this kind of meta-cognitive (thinking explicitly about how one learns/thinks) activity that students become conscious of how they learn, and more likely to discover what forms of support they require to learn most effectively. A simple way to encourage meta-cognition is to ask students to submit a short note along with an assignment in which they describe how it went. Such self-assessments will also help you respond more constructively to student work. When you know students were struggling to formulate their argument or synthesize material, or were happy about their improvements in clarity and style, you can focus your own comments accordingly.

Examples of Scaffolded Assignments for Various Disciplines

• Art History
• Chemistry
• Education Research Methods
• Geophysics & Metallurgy
• Organizational Behavior
• Social Psychology
• Public Policy

Scaffolded Writing Assignments (Interdisciplinary)

• Reaction Journals & Auto-ethnography
• Research Paper
• Term Paper
• Team Report
• Website Writing

Setting Up a Gradebook

Before the semester starts, take some time to figure out how you’ll organize your gradebook.

• Will you keep grades by hand?
• Will you use a spreadsheet?
• Will you grade on an online platform such as Blackboard?

As you’re setting up your gradebook, keep in mind that students will likely ask you how they are doing in the class during the course of the semester. It will be helpful to you if your grades are in an easy-to-manage space so that you can access current grade information for students.

Colleges vary in terms of how long students have the right to dispute their grades. Be sure that you know your school’s grade change policy. In the event a student initiates a grade dispute, it’s important that you have the necessary documentation to support the given grade. Students may come to you a semester, a year, or even a couple of years after you’ve had them in your class. You’ll likely have engaged with dozens or hundreds of students since then, and the records you keep will be helpful in refreshing your memory.

Taking a few minutes to write up some notes after you’ve graded each assignment or taught each class and unit to reflect on what went well (and what didn’t), where students struggled, and how long it took you to mark or prepare can be a helpful tool for revising your class after the semester and balancing your workload.

Flexibility in Your Course

“Effective teachers are not so devoted to their practice that they ignore the students in front of them.” - Leila Christenbury, “The Flexible Teacher.”

No matter how much teaching experience you have, you will never be able to predict with complete accuracy how your students will best learn in your course, because different students have different needs and learn in different ways. By approaching your course and teaching with a willingness to adapt, you can be more responsive to your students’ needs, as well as your own.

Being flexible does not mean not planning or preparing for class, changing plans on a whim, or doing whatever your students ask you to do. Instead, we suggest an approach that embraces flexibility within structure. Decide which elements of your course are non-negotiable, based on what you want your students to get out of the course and what your personal and professional boundaries and limitations are (such as how much time you’re able to spend grading, or how much mental bandwidth you have for class planning). Then, craft an overarching structure for your course. Stick by your non-negotiables, and then enable student choice by offering students a limited number of options within a particular framework. In this way, you empower students to take agency over elements of their learning, encourage productive metacognition (thinking about how they think), and validate that their individual needs and interests matter. At the same time, providing flexibility within your established structure ensures that students accomplish your non-negotiable goals for the course, and abide by your personal and professional boundaries and limits. Specific examples of where and how you might practice flexibility within structure include:

Learning Goals: In addition to the learning goals that are important to you and/or required by your department, consider doing an activity early in the semester in which students devise their own learning goals individually, in groups, and/or as a whole class. Then, include these on the syllabus, and build in elements throughout your course that accomplish these goals.

Lesson Structure: Sometimes it can be a good idea to approach a particular lesson with a firm idea of the goal/s of that lesson, but with different options and tools prepared for how to achieve those goals. For example, if you expected to cover topic B today but discover that students are still struggling with topic A from last class, consider integrating more opportunities for them to engage with topic A in today’s lesson, using different tools than you used last class. If you find that students are very interested in topic A, find meaningful ways to connect topic A to topic B, or create opportunities for students to pursue issues related to topic A while still accomplishing the day’s goals.

Deadlines: Strict deadlines are a major cause of anxiety among students, and there is little research to show that students learn better or are better prepared for the “real world” when subjected to them. Consider incorporating flexible deadlines into your course. You might implement “makeup days”: one or more days throughout the course when students may submit some or all late work with no penalty and no excuse needed. Or you might implement “late days”: give students a certain number of late days they can use at any point in the semester, with no penalty and no excuse needed. Or, you might implement “soft” (suggested) and “hard” (definitive) deadlines for some or all assignments. We encourage you to consider adopting a flexible deadline policy that does not ask students to provide excuses, and that offers students the chance to turn in some or all work late without penalty.

Related resources: makeup days article, sample annotated syllabus with late days policy, more ideas for flexible deadlines (higher ed), more ideas for flexible deadlines (K-12).

Assignments & Assessments: There are many ways you can be flexible and provide choices in your assignments and assessments. Here are some examples:

• Use a “total points” grading structure with points that exceed 100%, so students can choose which assignments/assessments to do
• Assign students select “core” assignments, to be supplemented with additional assignments that they choose from a list
• Provide options for assignment formats, such as essay, podcast, or presentation
• Allow students to choose assignment topics from a list or within certain parameters
• Allow students to choose which or how many assignments to do, such as two smaller assignments or one larger one
• Offer multiple types of questions on assessments, such as multiple choice or short answer, and ask students to choose a certain number to complete, allowing them to choose the types of questions they prefer. More models in Section III.

Participation: Provide multiple diverse ways for students to participate in your course, including online and offline, synchronous and asynchronous options. For example, students might speak up in class, a Slack chat, or a Blackboard discussion board.

Class Schedule: Schedule your classes such that what you cover and when depends on what the students need at the moment. For example, leave one or more days for catch-up or review as needed; switch the order of lessons or delete content depending on what students need more or less time on; take instant polls to survey students when they would rather take that quiz, cover that topic, or do that reading; choose or swap content based on student interests or needs. Leave blank or flexible spaces in your class schedule at the beginning of the semester, and provide an updated schedule later in the semester. Always provide plenty of notice to students that changes to the schedule have been made, refrain from making a plethora of changes as this can cause anxiety and uncertainty among students, and avoid making changes that end up giving students more work, or less time to complete their work.

Attendance: See section on attendance.

Grading: For example, you might drop the lowest grade/s of a particular assignment/assessment type, or of multiple types (e.g. students take five quizzes but only the highest four grades count). Or, you might give students the opportunity to choose how different assignment types are weighed in their final grade, from a range of options (for example, see “A Model of Flexible Grading” document available here).

For sample syllabi that demonstrate different kinds of flexibility in different areas, see:

• Our Student-Centered Evolving Syllabus by Cathy Davidson and Eduardo Vianna, for graduate class “Introduction to Engaged Teaching and Transformative Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences”
• Gamified syllabus by Carolyn Stallard, for undergraduate class “Music in Global America”