Assignment Self Assessment

Assignments provide students with opportunities to apply what they are learning in class and impart useful information to instructors on how to improve their teaching practices. Creating effective and meaningful assignments takes careful planning and skill. Students complain about assignments for a variety of reasons such as when they struggle with course material and feel threatened by being graded, when they are not clear about the criteria used to judge their performance, when they do not understand the assignment’s sense of purpose and view it as busy work, or when there are too many assignments in the class and they struggle to keep up. Below we provide a checklist informed by best practices in the literature on how to design effective assignments. See where you may improve.

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Resources

Balan, P., & Manickam, G. (2013, August). Promoting holistic education through design of meaningful and effective assignments in sustainable engineering. In Proceedings of 2013 IEEE international conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) (pp. 382-385). IEEE.

Barre, E. (2016, July 15). How much should we assign? Estimating out of class workload. Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from
https://cte.rice.edu/blog/2016/workload

Brooks, C. F., & Young, S. L. (2011). Are Choice-Making Opportunities Needed in the Classroom? Using Self-Determination Theory to Consider Student Motivation and Learner Empowerment. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(1), 48-59.

Columbia University. (n.d.). Designing Assignments for Learning. Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/designing-assignments/

Hutchings, P., Jankowski, N. A., & Schultz, K. E. (2016). Designing effective classroom assignments: Intellectual work worth sharing. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 48(1), 6-15.

Planchard, M., Daniel, K. L., Maroo, J., Mishra, C., & McLean, T. (2015). Homework, Motivation, and Academic Achievement in a College Genetics Course. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 41(2), 11-18.

Riddle, R. (2022, March 14). How Much Homework is Too Much? Duke Learning Innovation. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2018/10/how-much-homework-is-too-much/

Rosário, P., Núñez, J. C., Vallejo, G., Nunes, T., Cunha, J., Fuentes, S., & Valle, A. (2018). Homework purposes, homework behaviors, and academic achievement. Examining the mediating role of students’ perceived homework quality. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 53, 168-180.

Schroeder, C. (2011). Scaffolded assignments: designing structure and support. History, 22, 23.

Stevens, J. (2018). Finding the balance: Creating meaningful assignments without overwhelming instructional workload. Journal of Educators Online, 15(3), n3.

University of Chicago. (n.d.). Why Assignments? Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https://teaching.uchicago.edu/resources/evaluating-student-learning/assignments/

Vatterott, C. (2010). 5 Hallmarks of Good Homework. Educational Leadership, 68 (1), 10-15.