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Thriving in Academe

Meaningful Assignments
You Get What You Ask For
By Patricia Armstrong, Vanderbilt University and
Katherine Stanton, Princeton University

We have come to believe that meaningful assignments ask students to engage in intellectual invention.

When designing a course, it's common to focus on the material to be covered during class rather than on work done outside of class.

Observing this disparity, Richard Light argues that homework design profoundly impacts students' engagement and learning.

He offers an example of a powerful homework assignment from an economics seminar in which students are asked to write a paper taking a position on rent control contrary to the one they had argued in class.

Such an assignment requires students to challenge their own assumptions and beliefs by deconstructing a familiar or comfortable argument and then reconstructing an original one.

Determining what we value in student work constitutes an important first step in creating meaningful assignments. For some of us, that value derives from students' growing mastery of disciplinary standards. For others, it is the demonstration of creativity and originality.

Meet Patricia Armstrong and Katherine Stanton
A teacher of literary and cultural studies, Dr. Katherine Stanton is assistant director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. Her pedagogical interests include course design and the interpretive process; next spring, she is teaching a freshman seminar on the graphic novel. You can reach her at kstanton@princeton.edu.
Dr. Patricia Armstrong is assistant director of the Center for Teaching and senior lecturer in the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. She's passionate about working with students on writing and is currently teaching an advanced composition course in French. You can reach Patricia at Patricia.armstrong@vanderbilt.edu.

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