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Thriving in Academe
Best Practices

An Undergraduate Reveals What She Thinks About

I asked Joy Warrick, a junior at Vanderbilt majoring in Secondary Education and Spanish, to comment on assignments that have helped her learn in college. She made a clear distinction between "busy work," which students feel pressured rather than motivated to complete, and meaningful assignments, which require students to think on a deeper level. Joy acknowledged that this deeper kind of thinking takes more work, but added that "students will put more effort into an assignment a professor has put a lot of effort into."

Joy has benefited from sequenced assignments in which the professor provided guidance about how to complete each assignment. Guidelines were far more helpful to her than a checklist of tasks to complete, which she found limiting. She expressed a strong preference for assignments in which she was able to explore her own interests; doing so helped her to become "more invested in the subject matter."

Joy mentioned that she is disappointed when she doesn't receive feedback on assignments, and would like to receive more feedback on early assignments that she can apply to future work. When this feedback leads her to think about how she thinks and learns best, she feels "empowered" because she's not only learning about course material, but also exploring her own particular way of learning it.

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