Assignment Design - Santa Clara University

Sections:
General Principles of Assignment Design
Additional Resources

General Principles of Assignment Design

Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, deepen their understanding, form new ideas, connections, and questions, and show how they are achieving the course or program learning outcomes. Assignments can also affirm students' social identities, interests, and abilities in ways that foster belonging and academic success.

Characteristics of Effective, Engaging, and Equitable Assignments

Address the central learning outcomes/objectives of your courses. This ensures the relevancy of the assignment (students won’t wonder why they’re doing it) and provides you with an assessment of student learning that tells you about the progress your students are making.
Interesting and challenging. What assignments are most memorable to you? Chances are they asked you to apply knowledge to an interesting problem or to do it in a creative way. Assignments can be seen as more relevant when they connect to a real world problem or situation, or when students imagine they are presenting the information to a real world audience (e.g., policy makers), or when they can bring in some aspect of their own experience. Assignments can also be contextualized to reflect the values or priorities of the institution.
Follow the principles of Transparent Assignment Design. This approach reflects an explicit attempt to create more equity across students with different levels of academic experience by making assignment goals and expectations very clear, enabling all students to learn more and produce their very best work. Research shows (Wilkelmes, 2019) that students who understand the purpose, tasks and criteria of an academic assignment before they begin to work on it (in comparison with students who don’t share that understanding) experience higher academic confidence, an increased sense of belonging, and greater awareness that they are mastering the skills that employers value, as well as higher rates of returning to college the following year. Small changes in assignments also led to higher quality work and big improvements in student learning, with a stronger impact on students from groups that are underrepresented in higher education. Every assignment should make clear its:
- Purpose: Why are you asking students to do the assignment? How does it connect with course learning objectives and support broader skill development that students can draw upon well after your class is over? Often the purpose is very clear to us but we don’t always spell it out for our students.
- Tasks: What steps will students need to take to complete the assignment successfully? Laying this out helps students organize what they need to do and when.
- Criteria for Success: What does excellence look like? This can be described through text or a rubric that aligns expectations with the key elements of the assignment.
Prioritize questions of equity. Consider whether your assignment might prioritize specific forms of assessment that could misrepresent the abilities of certain student groups or be less culturally relevant to underserved students (Hobbs, Singer-Freeman, & Robinson, 2021). Can you revise your assignment to have greater:
- Utility value: How can you make adjustments that allow students to perceive the assignment has more value, either professionally, academically, or personally?
- Inclusive content: Is the assignment equally accessible to all students? If examples are drawn from the dominant culture, they are less accessible to students from other cultures. Structuring assignments so that content is equally familiar to all students reduces educational equity gaps by limiting the effects of prior knowledge and privilege.
- Flexibility and variety: Consider how much flexibility and variety you’re offering in your assignments. This allows students to show what they have learned regardless of their academic strengths or familiarity with particular assignment types. Can students choose among different formats for how they’ll present their assignment (paper, podcast or infographic); is there variety in formats across all the course assignments? Multi-modal assignments allow students to represent what they know in various ways and are therefore more equitable by design.
Support assignments with instructional activities. Planning learning activities that support students’ best work on their assignments is another critical component. This can include having students read model articles in the style in which you are asking them to prepare their own assignment, discuss or apply the rubric to a sample paper, or break the assignment into smaller pieces so that students can get feedback from you or peers on how they are progressing. Another way to support students is to make clear the role of tools like ChatGPT: if it’s used, how can students use it effectively and responsibly? More generally, all major assignments provide opportunities for important discussions about academic integrity and its relevance to work in one’s discipline, higher education, and personal development.
Provide opportunities for feedback and revision (especially if high-stakes). Students may receive feedback on their progress or drafts in a variety of ways: peer, faculty, or a library partner. The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning identifies four characteristics of effective feedback: Targeted and Concise; Focused; Action-Oriented; and Timely.

For assignments that ask students to write in the style of a particular discipline and draw upon research, SCU’s Success in Writing, Information, and Research Literacy (SWIRL) project has developed guidance for faculty in assignment design and instruction to improve student writing and critical use of information.

You can download the WRITE assignment design tool and learn more at the SWIRL website. Members of the SWIRL team welcome individual consultations with faculty on assignment design. You are welcome to contact them for feedback on any assignment you’re designing.

Additional Resources:

Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2021). Feedback for Learning. Columbia University. Retrieved [February 26, 2024] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/feedback-for-learning/

Hobbs H. T., Singer-Freeman K. E., Robinson C. (2021). Considering the effects of assignment choices on equity gaps. Research and Practice in Assessment, 16(1), 49–62.

SWIRL: For assignments that ask students to write in the style of a particular discipline and draw upon research, SCU’s Success in Writing, Information, and Research Literacy (SWIRL) project has developed guidance for faculty in assignment design and instruction to improve student writing and critical use of information. You can download the WRITE assignment design tool and learn more at the SWIRL website.

Winkelmes, M., Boye, A., & Tapp, S. (Eds.). (2019). Transparent design in higher education teaching and leadership. Stylus Publishing.

Page authors:
Chris Bachen

Last updated:
March 5, 2024