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Advocate Online
Thriving in Academe
Issues To Consider
Meaningful Assignments: How Much Trouble and Are They Worth It?
Won't grading meaningful assignments take too much time?
Grading takes time. But grading meaningful assignments makes better use of that time. Why? Grading meaningful assignments allows us to see how students are thinking and to comment on and inspire that thinking. As a result, we're more likely to want to evaluate what our students have written or completed.
On the question of workload, Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson urge us to check our assignments for their fit with our learning goals and their feasibility. They encourage instructors to examine their syllabi with this question in mind: "Is this workload reasonable, strategically placed, and sustainable for me and for my students?" (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998). In one of their examples, a business professor eased his grading load by assigning shorter case studies that developed specific analytic skills before assigning a full case analysis.
Can my students do complex analytic or creative work if they're still learning the basics of my discipline/profession?
Yes, but not right away. Your assignment sequences should gain in complexity over the course of the semester, asking students to do increasingly sophisticated work. Your first assignments may give students the opportunity to practice fundamental skills, while your subsequent ones (like the full case analysis above) may ask them to put those skills together. For a final assignment in an introductory course on the literary imagination, our colleague Erik Dussere asked his students to do both analytic and creative work, interpreting a text from the perspective of a character from a different text.
Before giving them feedback, how can I prepare students to do well on meaningful assignments?
If you're lecturing, consider modeling for your students the kinds of work your assignments require. For instance, construct your lecture as an argument or a case study. If you're facilitating a discussion, highlight the connection between the intellectual work you ask your students to do in class and what you expect them to do on the assignment. Consider giving your students the chance to practice what John Bean calls "critical thinking tasks" as homework assignments or in-class activities (Bean, 1996). These tasks include explaining a course concept to a classmate, writing a summary and response for an article or lecture, or writing a hypothetical dialogue between two thinkers. These tasks ask students to engage actively with course material, and can illuminate what they do (and don't) understand.
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References & Resources
Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bean, J.C. (1996). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning
in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Elbow, Peter. (1986). Embracing contraries: explorations in learning and teaching. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fink, L.D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hutchings, P. (2005, January). Building pedagogical intelligence. Carnegie Perspectives.
Retrieved July 11, 2005, from
www.carnegiefoundation.org/
perspectives.
Light, R.J. (2001). Making the most of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Walvoord, B.E. & Anderson, V.J. (1998). Effective grading; A tool for learning and assessment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2001). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
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