Each week, the Faculty Collaborative for Teaching will bring you an easy-to-implement tool that you can use immediately in your classroom teaching. The goals of these tips will be to broaden your teaching toolbox, share resources on teaching, and alert you to upcoming teaching and learning opportunities from the Faculty Collaborative.

TUESDAY TEACHING TIP: Tune Up Your Assignments for Equity, Engagement, and Efficacy.

Before long you’ll put the finishing touches on your spring quarter syllabi.  It's a great time to take a few minutes to review course assignments with fresh eyes. Small but significant changes can make assignments more inclusive, relevant, clear, and effective for all students. 

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. 

So, how can we make strategic changes to our assignments to accomplish the course learning goals, and promote engagement, equitable learning, inclusivity, and belonging?

Today’s tip focuses on principles of transparent and equitable assignment design. 

Transparent design is 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.

Other approaches to increasing equity in assignments have examined ways specific forms of assessment might misrepresent the abilities of certain student groups or be less culturally relevant to underserved students (Hobbs, Singer-Freeman, & Robinson, 2021). These researchers recommend that you ensure your assignments have “utility value” and “inclusive content” (more on these criteria below). 

This week, we challenge you to review your assignments guided by a Transparent Assignment Design or equity framework.  

Here’s one way to do it 

• If you don’t know much about the Transparency in Learning and Teaching project, watch this 7-minute video to learn about the framework and the research behind it. 
• Then use this checklist to evaluate your own assignment for transparency and see where you can make some important changes in how you present the assignment and talk about it in class  (hint: it’s often right up front, in the purpose section!). 

How else can you transform your assignments to be more engaging and equitable? Ask questions about

• 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 or infographic); is there variety in formats across all the course assignments? 

DID YOU DO IT?

Let us know how it went? We would love to hear your feedback about how you implemented today’s Tuesday Teaching Tip in your course planning or teaching?  Click here to fill out our 3-question survey.

WANT TO READ A LITTLE MORE?

• Faculty Collaborative DRT page on Assignment Design

• 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.
• Winkelmes, M. A., Boye, A., & Tapp, S. (2019). Transparent design in higher education teaching and leadership: A guide to implementing the transparency framework institution-wide to improve learning and retention. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

This week’s Tuesday Teaching Tip was prepared by Chris Bachen on behalf of the Faculty Collaborative.

Missed a teaching tip? Read them all here:

• Teaching Tip #1 - Reflection (January 30, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #2 - Mid-Course Evaluation (February 6, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #3 - Beyond Think-Pair-Share (February 13, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #4 Grading–Good for them and good for you? (February 20, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #5 - Inclusive Teaching (February 27, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #6 - Mindfulness and Self Care (March 5, 2024)
• Teaching Tip #7 - Syllabus Design

And check out our full calendar of CAFEs and other Faculty Development and Faculty Collaborative events