articles on designing assignments

Creative Ways to Design Assignments for Student Success

There are many creative ways in which teachers can design assignments to support student success. We can do this while simultaneously not getting bogged down with the various obstructions that keep students from both completing and learning from the assignments. For me, assignments fall into two categories: those that are graded automatically, such as SmartBook® readings and quizzes in Connect®; and those that I need to grade by hand, such as writing assignments.  

For those of us teaching large, introductory classes, most of our assignments are graded automatically, which is great for our time management. But our students will ultimately deliver a plethora of colorful excuses as to why they were not completed and why extensions are warranted. How do we give them a little leeway to make the semester run more smoothly, so there are fewer worries about a reading that was missed or a quiz that went by too quickly? Here are a few tactics I use. 

Automatically graded assignments: 

Multiple assignment attempts  

• This eases the mental pressure of a timed assignment and covers computer mishaps or human error on the first attempt. 
• You can deduct points for every attempt taken if you are worried about students taking advantage. 

Automatically dropped assignments  

• Within a subset or set of assignments, automatically drop a few from grading. This can take care of all excuses for missing an assignment. 
• Additionally, you can give a little grade boost to those who complete all their assignments (over a certain grade). 

Due dates  

• Consider staggering due dates during the week instead of making them all due on Sunday night.  
• Set the due date for readings the night before you cover the material, so students are prepared.  

Requirements  

• If we want our students to read, then make a reading assignment a requirement of a quiz. 

The tactics above might be applied to written assignments, too. An easy way to bolster a student’s interest and investment in these longer assignments is to give them a choice. This could be in the topic, location of study, or presentation style. For example, if you want them to analyze the susceptibility of a beach to hurricane threat, why not let them choose the location? In this way, you will also be gaining a lot of new information for your own use. 

With a small amount of effort, we can design our classes, so students concentrate on learning the subject matter rather than the logistics of completing the assignments. 

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How Do I Create Meaningful and Effective Assignments?

Prepared by allison boye, ph.d. teaching, learning, and professional development center.

Assessment is a necessary part of the teaching and learning process, helping us measure whether our students have really learned what we want them to learn. While exams and quizzes are certainly favorite and useful methods of assessment, out of class assignments (written or otherwise) can offer similar insights into our students' learning.  And just as creating a reliable test takes thoughtfulness and skill, so does creating meaningful and effective assignments. Undoubtedly, many instructors have been on the receiving end of disappointing student work, left wondering what went wrong… and often, those problems can be remedied in the future by some simple fine-tuning of the original assignment.  This paper will take a look at some important elements to consider when developing assignments, and offer some easy approaches to creating a valuable assessment experience for all involved.

First Things First…

Before assigning any major tasks to students, it is imperative that you first define a few things for yourself as the instructor:

• Your goals for the assignment . Why are you assigning this project, and what do you hope your students will gain from completing it? What knowledge, skills, and abilities do you aim to measure with this assignment?  Creating assignments is a major part of overall course design, and every project you assign should clearly align with your goals for the course in general.  For instance, if you want your students to demonstrate critical thinking, perhaps asking them to simply summarize an article is not the best match for that goal; a more appropriate option might be to ask for an analysis of a controversial issue in the discipline. Ultimately, the connection between the assignment and its purpose should be clear to both you and your students to ensure that it is fulfilling the desired goals and doesn't seem like “busy work.” For some ideas about what kinds of assignments match certain learning goals, take a look at this page from DePaul University's Teaching Commons.
• Have they experienced “socialization” in the culture of your discipline (Flaxman, 2005)? Are they familiar with any conventions you might want them to know? In other words, do they know the “language” of your discipline, generally accepted style guidelines, or research protocols?
• Do they know how to conduct research?  Do they know the proper style format, documentation style, acceptable resources, etc.? Do they know how to use the library (Fitzpatrick, 1989) or evaluate resources?
• What kinds of writing or work have they previously engaged in?  For instance, have they completed long, formal writing assignments or research projects before? Have they ever engaged in analysis, reflection, or argumentation? Have they completed group assignments before?  Do they know how to write a literature review or scientific report?

In his book Engaging Ideas (1996), John Bean provides a great list of questions to help instructors focus on their main teaching goals when creating an assignment (p.78):

1. What are the main units/modules in my course?

2. What are my main learning objectives for each module and for the course?

3. What thinking skills am I trying to develop within each unit and throughout the course?

4. What are the most difficult aspects of my course for students?

5. If I could change my students' study habits, what would I most like to change?

6. What difference do I want my course to make in my students' lives?

What your students need to know

Once you have determined your own goals for the assignment and the levels of your students, you can begin creating your assignment.  However, when introducing your assignment to your students, there are several things you will need to clearly outline for them in order to ensure the most successful assignments possible.

• First, you will need to articulate the purpose of the assignment . Even though you know why the assignment is important and what it is meant to accomplish, you cannot assume that your students will intuit that purpose. Your students will appreciate an understanding of how the assignment fits into the larger goals of the course and what they will learn from the process (Hass & Osborn, 2007). Being transparent with your students and explaining why you are asking them to complete a given assignment can ultimately help motivate them to complete the assignment more thoughtfully.
• If you are asking your students to complete a writing assignment, you should define for them the “rhetorical or cognitive mode/s” you want them to employ in their writing (Flaxman, 2005). In other words, use precise verbs that communicate whether you are asking them to analyze, argue, describe, inform, etc.  (Verbs like “explore” or “comment on” can be too vague and cause confusion.) Provide them with a specific task to complete, such as a problem to solve, a question to answer, or an argument to support.  For those who want assignments to lead to top-down, thesis-driven writing, John Bean (1996) suggests presenting a proposition that students must defend or refute, or a problem that demands a thesis answer.
• It is also a good idea to define the audience you want your students to address with their assignment, if possible – especially with writing assignments.  Otherwise, students will address only the instructor, often assuming little requires explanation or development (Hedengren, 2004; MIT, 1999). Further, asking students to address the instructor, who typically knows more about the topic than the student, places the student in an unnatural rhetorical position.  Instead, you might consider asking your students to prepare their assignments for alternative audiences such as other students who missed last week's classes, a group that opposes their position, or people reading a popular magazine or newspaper.  In fact, a study by Bean (1996) indicated the students often appreciate and enjoy assignments that vary elements such as audience or rhetorical context, so don't be afraid to get creative!
• Obviously, you will also need to articulate clearly the logistics or “business aspects” of the assignment . In other words, be explicit with your students about required elements such as the format, length, documentation style, writing style (formal or informal?), and deadlines.  One caveat, however: do not allow the logistics of the paper take precedence over the content in your assignment description; if you spend all of your time describing these things, students might suspect that is all you care about in their execution of the assignment.
• Finally, you should clarify your evaluation criteria for the assignment. What elements of content are most important? Will you grade holistically or weight features separately? How much weight will be given to individual elements, etc?  Another precaution to take when defining requirements for your students is to take care that your instructions and rubric also do not overshadow the content; prescribing too rigidly each element of an assignment can limit students' freedom to explore and discover. According to Beth Finch Hedengren, “A good assignment provides the purpose and guidelines… without dictating exactly what to say” (2004, p. 27).  If you decide to utilize a grading rubric, be sure to provide that to the students along with the assignment description, prior to their completion of the assignment.

A great way to get students engaged with an assignment and build buy-in is to encourage their collaboration on its design and/or on the grading criteria (Hudd, 2003). In his article “Conducting Writing Assignments,” Richard Leahy (2002) offers a few ideas for building in said collaboration:

• Ask the students to develop the grading scale themselves from scratch, starting with choosing the categories.

• Set the grading categories yourself, but ask the students to help write the descriptions.

• Draft the complete grading scale yourself, then give it to your students for review and suggestions.

A Few Do's and Don'ts…

Determining your goals for the assignment and its essential logistics is a good start to creating an effective assignment. However, there are a few more simple factors to consider in your final design. First, here are a few things you should do :

• Do provide detail in your assignment description . Research has shown that students frequently prefer some guiding constraints when completing assignments (Bean, 1996), and that more detail (within reason) can lead to more successful student responses.  One idea is to provide students with physical assignment handouts , in addition to or instead of a simple description in a syllabus.  This can meet the needs of concrete learners and give them something tangible to refer to.  Likewise, it is often beneficial to make explicit for students the process or steps necessary to complete an assignment, given that students – especially younger ones – might need guidance in planning and time management (MIT, 1999).
• Do use open-ended questions.  The most effective and challenging assignments focus on questions that lead students to thinking and explaining, rather than simple yes or no answers, whether explicitly part of the assignment description or in the  brainstorming heuristics (Gardner, 2005).
• Do direct students to appropriate available resources . Giving students pointers about other venues for assistance can help them get started on the right track independently. These kinds of suggestions might include information about campus resources such as the University Writing Center or discipline-specific librarians, suggesting specific journals or books, or even sections of their textbook, or providing them with lists of research ideas or links to acceptable websites.
• Do consider providing models – both successful and unsuccessful models (Miller, 2007). These models could be provided by past students, or models you have created yourself.  You could even ask students to evaluate the models themselves using the determined evaluation criteria, helping them to visualize the final product, think critically about how to complete the assignment, and ideally, recognize success in their own work.
• Do consider including a way for students to make the assignment their own. In their study, Hass and Osborn (2007) confirmed the importance of personal engagement for students when completing an assignment.  Indeed, students will be more engaged in an assignment if it is personally meaningful, practical, or purposeful beyond the classroom.  You might think of ways to encourage students to tap into their own experiences or curiosities, to solve or explore a real problem, or connect to the larger community.  Offering variety in assignment selection can also help students feel more individualized, creative, and in control.
• If your assignment is substantial or long, do consider sequencing it. Far too often, assignments are given as one-shot final products that receive grades at the end of the semester, eternally abandoned by the student.  By sequencing a large assignment, or essentially breaking it down into a systematic approach consisting of interconnected smaller elements (such as a project proposal, an annotated bibliography, or a rough draft, or a series of mini-assignments related to the longer assignment), you can encourage thoughtfulness, complexity, and thoroughness in your students, as well as emphasize process over final product.

Next are a few elements to avoid in your assignments:

• Do not ask too many questions in your assignment.  In an effort to challenge students, instructors often err in the other direction, asking more questions than students can reasonably address in a single assignment without losing focus. Offering an overly specific “checklist” prompt often leads to externally organized papers, in which inexperienced students “slavishly follow the checklist instead of integrating their ideas into more organically-discovered structure” (Flaxman, 2005).
• Do not expect or suggest that there is an “ideal” response to the assignment. A common error for instructors is to dictate content of an assignment too rigidly, or to imply that there is a single correct response or a specific conclusion to reach, either explicitly or implicitly (Flaxman, 2005). Undoubtedly, students do not appreciate feeling as if they must read an instructor's mind to complete an assignment successfully, or that their own ideas have nowhere to go, and can lose motivation as a result. Similarly, avoid assignments that simply ask for regurgitation (Miller, 2007). Again, the best assignments invite students to engage in critical thinking, not just reproduce lectures or readings.
• Do not provide vague or confusing commands . Do students know what you mean when they are asked to “examine” or “discuss” a topic? Return to what you determined about your students' experiences and levels to help you decide what directions will make the most sense to them and what will require more explanation or guidance, and avoid verbiage that might confound them.
• Do not impose impossible time restraints or require the use of insufficient resources for completion of the assignment.  For instance, if you are asking all of your students to use the same resource, ensure that there are enough copies available for all students to access – or at least put one copy on reserve in the library. Likewise, make sure that you are providing your students with ample time to locate resources and effectively complete the assignment (Fitzpatrick, 1989).

The assignments we give to students don't simply have to be research papers or reports. There are many options for effective yet creative ways to assess your students' learning! Here are just a few:

Journals, Posters, Portfolios, Letters, Brochures, Management plans, Editorials, Instruction Manuals, Imitations of a text, Case studies, Debates, News release, Dialogues, Videos, Collages, Plays, Power Point presentations

Ultimately, the success of student responses to an assignment often rests on the instructor's deliberate design of the assignment. By being purposeful and thoughtful from the beginning, you can ensure that your assignments will not only serve as effective assessment methods, but also engage and delight your students. If you would like further help in constructing or revising an assignment, the Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center is glad to offer individual consultations. In addition, look into some of the resources provided below.

Online Resources

“Creating Effective Assignments” http://www.unh.edu/teaching-excellence/resources/Assignments.htm This site, from the University of New Hampshire's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning,  provides a brief overview of effective assignment design, with a focus on determining and communicating goals and expectations.

Gardner, T.  (2005, June 12). Ten Tips for Designing Writing Assignments. Traci's Lists of Ten. http://www.tengrrl.com/tens/034.shtml This is a brief yet useful list of tips for assignment design, prepared by a writing teacher and curriculum developer for the National Council of Teachers of English .  The website will also link you to several other lists of “ten tips” related to literacy pedagogy.

“How to Create Effective Assignments for College Students.”  http:// tilt.colostate.edu/retreat/2011/zimmerman.pdf     This PDF is a simplified bulleted list, prepared by Dr. Toni Zimmerman from Colorado State University, offering some helpful ideas for coming up with creative assignments.

“Learner-Centered Assessment” http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/learner_centered_assessment.html From the Centre for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo, this is a short list of suggestions for the process of designing an assessment with your students' interests in mind. “Matching Learning Goals to Assignment Types.” http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/How_to/design_assignments/assignments_learning_goals.html This is a great page from DePaul University's Teaching Commons, providing a chart that helps instructors match assignments with learning goals.

Additional References 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.

Fitzpatrick, R. (1989). Research and writing assignments that reduce fear lead to better papers and more confident students. Writing Across the Curriculum , 3.2, pp. 15 – 24.

Flaxman, R. (2005). Creating meaningful writing assignments. The Teaching Exchange .  Retrieved Jan. 9, 2008 from http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Sheridan_Center/pubs/teachingExchange/jan2005/01_flaxman.pdf

Hass, M. & Osborn, J. (2007, August 13). An emic view of student writing and the writing process. Across the Disciplines, 4. 

Hedengren, B.F. (2004). A TA's guide to teaching writing in all disciplines . Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Hudd, S. S. (2003, April). Syllabus under construction: Involving students in the creation of class assignments.  Teaching Sociology , 31, pp. 195 – 202.

Leahy, R. (2002). Conducting writing assignments. College Teaching , 50.2, pp. 50 – 54.

Miller, H. (2007). Designing effective writing assignments.  Teaching with writing .  University of Minnesota Center for Writing. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2008, from http://writing.umn.edu/tww/assignments/designing.html

MIT Online Writing and Communication Center (1999). Creating Writing Assignments. Retrieved January 9, 2008 from http://web.mit.edu/writing/Faculty/createeffective.html .

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Designing Assignments for Learning

The rapid shift to remote teaching and learning meant that many instructors reimagined their assessment practices. Whether adapting existing assignments or creatively designing new opportunities for their students to learn, instructors focused on helping students make meaning and demonstrate their learning outside of the traditional, face-to-face classroom setting. This resource distills the elements of assignment design that are important to carry forward as we continue to seek better ways of assessing learning and build on our innovative assignment designs.

On this page:

Rethinking traditional tests, quizzes, and exams.

• Examples from the Columbia University Classroom
• Tips for Designing Assignments for Learning

Reflect On Your Assignment Design

Connect with the ctl.

• Resources and References

Cite this resource: Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (2021). Designing Assignments for Learning. Columbia University. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/teaching-with-technology/teaching-online/designing-assignments/

Traditional assessments tend to reveal whether students can recognize, recall, or replicate what was learned out of context, and tend to focus on students providing correct responses (Wiggins, 1990). In contrast, authentic assignments, which are course assessments, engage students in higher order thinking, as they grapple with real or simulated challenges that help them prepare for their professional lives, and draw on the course knowledge learned and the skills acquired to create justifiable answers, performances or products (Wiggins, 1990). An authentic assessment provides opportunities for students to practice, consult resources, learn from feedback, and refine their performances and products accordingly (Wiggins 1990, 1998, 2014). 

Authentic assignments ask students to “do” the subject with an audience in mind and apply their learning in a new situation. Examples of authentic assignments include asking students to: 

• Write for a real audience (e.g., a memo, a policy brief, letter to the editor, a grant proposal, reports, building a website) and/or publication;
• Solve problem sets that have real world application; 
• Design projects that address a real world problem; 
• Engage in a community-partnered research project;
• Create an exhibit, performance, or conference presentation ;
• Compile and reflect on their work through a portfolio/e-portfolio.

Noteworthy elements of authentic designs are that instructors scaffold the assignment, and play an active role in preparing students for the tasks assigned, while students are intentionally asked to reflect on the process and product of their work thus building their metacognitive skills (Herrington and Oliver, 2000; Ashford-Rowe, Herrington and Brown, 2013; Frey, Schmitt, and Allen, 2012). 

It’s worth noting here that authentic assessments can initially be time consuming to design, implement, and grade. They are critiqued for being challenging to use across course contexts and for grading reliability issues (Maclellan, 2004). Despite these challenges, authentic assessments are recognized as beneficial to student learning (Svinicki, 2004) as they are learner-centered (Weimer, 2013), promote academic integrity (McLaughlin, L. and Ricevuto, 2021; Sotiriadou et al., 2019; Schroeder, 2021) and motivate students to learn (Ambrose et al., 2010). The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning is always available to consult with faculty who are considering authentic assessment designs and to discuss challenges and affordances.   

Examples from the Columbia University Classroom 

Columbia instructors have experimented with alternative ways of assessing student learning from oral exams to technology-enhanced assignments. Below are a few examples of authentic assignments in various teaching contexts across Columbia University. 

• E-portfolios: Statia Cook shares her experiences with an ePorfolio assignment in her co-taught Frontiers of Science course (a submission to the Voices of Hybrid and Online Teaching and Learning initiative); CUIMC use of ePortfolios ;
• Case studies: Columbia instructors have engaged their students in authentic ways through case studies drawing on the Case Consortium at Columbia University. Read and watch a faculty spotlight to learn how Professor Mary Ann Price uses the case method to place pre-med students in real-life scenarios;
• Simulations: students at CUIMC engage in simulations to develop their professional skills in The Mary & Michael Jaharis Simulation Center in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Helene Fuld Health Trust Simulation Center in the Columbia School of Nursing; 
• Experiential learning: instructors have drawn on New York City as a learning laboratory such as Barnard’s NYC as Lab webpage which highlights courses that engage students in NYC;
• Design projects that address real world problems: Yevgeniy Yesilevskiy on the Engineering design projects completed using lab kits during remote learning. Watch Dr. Yesilevskiy talk about his teaching and read the Columbia News article . 
• Writing assignments: Lia Marshall and her teaching associate Aparna Balasundaram reflect on their “non-disposable or renewable assignments” to prepare social work students for their professional lives as they write for a real audience; and Hannah Weaver spoke about a sandbox assignment used in her Core Literature Humanities course at the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium . Watch Dr. Weaver share her experiences.  

​Tips for Designing Assignments for Learning

While designing an effective authentic assignment may seem like a daunting task, the following tips can be used as a starting point. See the Resources section for frameworks and tools that may be useful in this effort.  

Align the assignment with your course learning objectives 

Identify the kind of thinking that is important in your course, the knowledge students will apply, and the skills they will practice using through the assignment. What kind of thinking will students be asked to do for the assignment? What will students learn by completing this assignment? How will the assignment help students achieve the desired course learning outcomes? For more information on course learning objectives, see the CTL’s Course Design Essentials self-paced course and watch the video on Articulating Learning Objectives .  

Identify an authentic meaning-making task

For meaning-making to occur, students need to understand the relevance of the assignment to the course and beyond (Ambrose et al., 2010). To Bean (2011) a “meaning-making” or “meaning-constructing” task has two dimensions: 1) it presents students with an authentic disciplinary problem or asks students to formulate their own problems, both of which engage them in active critical thinking, and 2) the problem is placed in “a context that gives students a role or purpose, a targeted audience, and a genre.” (Bean, 2011: 97-98). 

An authentic task gives students a realistic challenge to grapple with, a role to take on that allows them to “rehearse for the complex ambiguities” of life, provides resources and supports to draw on, and requires students to justify their work and the process they used to inform their solution (Wiggins, 1990). Note that if students find an assignment interesting or relevant, they will see value in completing it. 

Consider the kind of activities in the real world that use the knowledge and skills that are the focus of your course. How is this knowledge and these skills applied to answer real-world questions to solve real-world problems? (Herrington et al., 2010: 22). What do professionals or academics in your discipline do on a regular basis? What does it mean to think like a biologist, statistician, historian, social scientist? How might your assignment ask students to draw on current events, issues, or problems that relate to the course and are of interest to them? How might your assignment tap into student motivation and engage them in the kinds of thinking they can apply to better understand the world around them? (Ambrose et al., 2010). 

Determine the evaluation criteria and create a rubric

To ensure equitable and consistent grading of assignments across students, make transparent the criteria you will use to evaluate student work. The criteria should focus on the knowledge and skills that are central to the assignment. Build on the criteria identified, create a rubric that makes explicit the expectations of deliverables and share this rubric with your students so they can use it as they work on the assignment. For more information on rubrics, see the CTL’s resource Incorporating Rubrics into Your Grading and Feedback Practices , and explore the Association of American Colleges & Universities VALUE Rubrics (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education). 

Build in metacognition

Ask students to reflect on what and how they learned from the assignment. Help students uncover personal relevance of the assignment, find intrinsic value in their work, and deepen their motivation by asking them to reflect on their process and their assignment deliverable. Sample prompts might include: what did you learn from this assignment? How might you draw on the knowledge and skills you used on this assignment in the future? See Ambrose et al., 2010 for more strategies that support motivation and the CTL’s resource on Metacognition ). 

Provide students with opportunities to practice

Design your assignment to be a learning experience and prepare students for success on the assignment. If students can reasonably expect to be successful on an assignment when they put in the required effort ,with the support and guidance of the instructor, they are more likely to engage in the behaviors necessary for learning (Ambrose et al., 2010). Ensure student success by actively teaching the knowledge and skills of the course (e.g., how to problem solve, how to write for a particular audience), modeling the desired thinking, and creating learning activities that build up to a graded assignment. Provide opportunities for students to practice using the knowledge and skills they will need for the assignment, whether through low-stakes in-class activities or homework activities that include opportunities to receive and incorporate formative feedback. For more information on providing feedback, see the CTL resource Feedback for Learning . 

Communicate about the assignment 

Share the purpose, task, audience, expectations, and criteria for the assignment. Students may have expectations about assessments and how they will be graded that is informed by their prior experiences completing high-stakes assessments, so be transparent. Tell your students why you are asking them to do this assignment, what skills they will be using, how it aligns with the course learning outcomes, and why it is relevant to their learning and their professional lives (i.e., how practitioners / professionals use the knowledge and skills in your course in real world contexts and for what purposes). Finally, verify that students understand what they need to do to complete the assignment. This can be done by asking students to respond to poll questions about different parts of the assignment, a “scavenger hunt” of the assignment instructions–giving students questions to answer about the assignment and having them work in small groups to answer the questions, or by having students share back what they think is expected of them.

Plan to iterate and to keep the focus on learning 

Draw on multiple sources of data to help make decisions about what changes are needed to the assignment, the assignment instructions, and/or rubric to ensure that it contributes to student learning. Explore assignment performance data. As Deandra Little reminds us: “a really good assignment, which is a really good assessment, also teaches you something or tells the instructor something. As much as it tells you what students are learning, it’s also telling you what they aren’t learning.” ( Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode 337 ). Assignment bottlenecks–where students get stuck or struggle–can be good indicators that students need further support or opportunities to practice prior to completing an assignment. This awareness can inform teaching decisions. 

Triangulate the performance data by collecting student feedback, and noting your own reflections about what worked well and what did not. Revise the assignment instructions, rubric, and teaching practices accordingly. Consider how you might better align your assignment with your course objectives and/or provide more opportunities for students to practice using the knowledge and skills that they will rely on for the assignment. Additionally, keep in mind societal, disciplinary, and technological changes as you tweak your assignments for future use. 

Now is a great time to reflect on your practices and experiences with assignment design and think critically about your approach. Take a closer look at an existing assignment. Questions to consider include: What is this assignment meant to do? What purpose does it serve? Why do you ask students to do this assignment? How are they prepared to complete the assignment? Does the assignment assess the kind of learning that you really want? What would help students learn from this assignment? 

Using the tips in the previous section: How can the assignment be tweaked to be more authentic and meaningful to students? 

As you plan forward for post-pandemic teaching and reflect on your practices and reimagine your course design, you may find the following CTL resources helpful: Reflecting On Your Experiences with Remote Teaching , Transition to In-Person Teaching , and Course Design Support .

The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is here to help!

For assistance with assignment design, rubric design, or any other teaching and learning need, please request a consultation by emailing [email protected] . 

Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework for assignments. The TILT Examples and Resources page ( https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources ) includes example assignments from across disciplines, as well as a transparent assignment template and a checklist for designing transparent assignments . Each emphasizes the importance of articulating to students the purpose of the assignment or activity, the what and how of the task, and specifying the criteria that will be used to assess students. 

Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) offers VALUE ADD (Assignment Design and Diagnostic) tools ( https://www.aacu.org/value-add-tools ) to help with the creation of clear and effective assignments that align with the desired learning outcomes and associated VALUE rubrics (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education). VALUE ADD encourages instructors to explicitly state assignment information such as the purpose of the assignment, what skills students will be using, how it aligns with course learning outcomes, the assignment type, the audience and context for the assignment, clear evaluation criteria, desired formatting, and expectations for completion whether individual or in a group.

Villarroel et al. (2017) propose a blueprint for building authentic assessments which includes four steps: 1) consider the workplace context, 2) design the authentic assessment; 3) learn and apply standards for judgement; and 4) give feedback. 

References 

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., & DiPietro, M. (2010). Chapter 3: What Factors Motivate Students to Learn? In How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching . Jossey-Bass. 

Ashford-Rowe, K., Herrington, J., and Brown, C. (2013). Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 39(2), 205-222, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.819566 .  

Bean, J.C. (2011). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom . Second Edition. Jossey-Bass. 

Frey, B. B, Schmitt, V. L., and Allen, J. P. (2012). Defining Authentic Classroom Assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation. 17(2). DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/sxbs-0829  

Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., and Oliver, R. (2010). A Guide to Authentic e-Learning . Routledge. 

Herrington, J. and Oliver, R. (2000). An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 48(3), 23-48. 

Litchfield, B. C. and Dempsey, J. V. (2015). Authentic Assessment of Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 142 (Summer 2015), 65-80. 

Maclellan, E. (2004). How convincing is alternative assessment for use in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 29(3), June 2004. DOI: 10.1080/0260293042000188267

McLaughlin, L. and Ricevuto, J. (2021). Assessments in a Virtual Environment: You Won’t Need that Lockdown Browser! Faculty Focus. June 2, 2021. 

Mueller, J. (2005). The Authentic Assessment Toolbox: Enhancing Student Learning through Online Faculty Development . MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. 1(1). July 2005. Mueller’s Authentic Assessment Toolbox is available online. 

Schroeder, R. (2021). Vaccinate Against Cheating With Authentic Assessment . Inside Higher Ed. (February 26, 2021).  

Sotiriadou, P., Logan, D., Daly, A., and Guest, R. (2019). The role of authentic assessment to preserve academic integrity and promote skills development and employability. Studies in Higher Education. 45(111), 2132-2148. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1582015    

Stachowiak, B. (Host). (November 25, 2020). Authentic Assignments with Deandra Little. (Episode 337). In Teaching in Higher Ed . https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/authentic-assignments/  

Svinicki, M. D. (2004). Authentic Assessment: Testing in Reality. New Directions for Teaching and Learning. 100 (Winter 2004): 23-29. 

Villarroel, V., Bloxham, S, Bruna, D., Bruna, C., and Herrera-Seda, C. (2017). Authentic assessment: creating a blueprint for course design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 43(5), 840-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1412396    

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Wiggins, Grant (1990). The Case for Authentic Assessment . Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation , 2(2). 

Wondering how AI tools might play a role in your course assignments?

See the CTL’s resource “Considerations for AI Tools in the Classroom.”

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Designing Assignments and Activities with ChatGPT and Generative AI in Mind

Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, can be a powerful tool to engage students in learning and creativity. Essentially, generative AI tools are those that create content on their own without human intervention. It can be useful for writing text, generating ideas, creating images, writing and editing code, and more. By designing assignments that incorporate generative AI technology, instructors can provide students with opportunities to explore, create, and problem-solve. However, as an instructor, you may also want to create assignments that challenge students to demonstrate their own knowledge and skills without relying heavily on AI-generated content. In this article, we will review different assignment ideas and strategies to create prompts and assignment ideas in different disciplines.

Table of Contents

Syllabus statements and student input, is ai use cheating.

• AI Detection
• Design Assignments to Limit AI Use
• Design Assignments to Work with AI
• Registration
• Recording from August, 2023
• Workshop Slides

Intelligent.com conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current college students in May 2023 regarding their use of ChatGPT for coursework. 30% of students used ChatGPT for coursework during the 2022/2023 academic year, and of that group, 46% utilized it frequently. Users of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools like Bing Chat and Google Bard continue to grow with some flattening of the upward trend in summer 2023. Generative AI is rapidly advancing and becoming more prevalent in education, work, and our daily lives. As an educator, it’s a good idea to help students be aware of the ethical considerations surrounding the use of generative AI.

• Consider adding an acceptable use statement in your syllabus. Here are some guidelines and examples.
• How do you think generative AI can be applied to the course assignments in this class?
• Can you share any specific examples of generative AI being used in educational settings?
• How can we ensure that AI tools are used in a way that promotes skill development in our course?
• After reviewing the assignment directions and grading information, what would be some helpful uses of AI tools that will still allow you to learn the content and demonstrate your learning?
• Based on various surveys and instructor experiences, not all students believe it is ethical to use AI on assignments. Be sure to include a discussion/policy about how AI can or cannot be used in group work.

There is no standard for determining if AI use by students qualifies as plagiarism or cheating . There is also no consistent standard for citing or crediting work using an AI tool. It may be useful to check with your professional organizations and journals and share any of their policies with students. Currently, AI is part of retail and other business careers, education in personalized learning, systems that make recommendations, human resources decisions, healthcare, agriculture, gaming, marketing, finance, and more .

Organization and publication examples:

• RTDNA Journalism Association
• NIH Grants Peer Review Policy
• IEEE Journal Submission Policy

Citation Style Guidance:

• APA: How to Cite ChatGPT
• MLA: How Do I Cite Generative AI in MLA Style?
• Chicago Style Manual

It may be useful to reflect on how you define plagiarism and cheating and then help guide students to think about it. Review this image from Matt Miller @DitchThatTextbook to help guide your thinking.

No True Detection of AI is Possible

There is no “fool-proof” way to detect AI use in student projects, and there have been many stories published about false positives and negatives using various AI detectors.

At NC State University, we provide access to Turnitin, which has an AI detector if you would like to get some input on if students have used AI to craft their writing. That said, do not use Turnitin as sole evidence that a student has cheated or plagiarized. Please review the academic integrity guidance and policies from the Office of Student Conduct. Note that the Division of Academic and Student Affairs also encourages faculty to notify students if they plan on using Turnitin.

• Turnitin at NC State
• Turnitin AI Detection
• Article on AI detection issues with Turnitin

AI detection and AI detector workaround programs are regularly being created and released. Here are some common tools and videos guiding students and content creators on how to get around AI detection.

• AI Text Classifier by OpenAI
• AI Content Detector: Writer  
• AI Writing CheckWriter’s AI Content Detector
• Video: How to Not Get Caught Using ChatGPT at School
• Video: New Way to Bypass AI Detection

There are also some red flags you can look for in reviewing student work. It’s helpful (albeit difficult in large classes) if you know your students writing and can determine if an assignment does not fit their typical way or level of writing. What to look for:

• A factual error or made-up citation
• Missing required assignment data sources or article text
• “Too perfect” in terms of grammar and usage
• Overly formal, detached, or impersonal style/tone
• Predictable formations – -like a five-paragraph essay from middle school language arts
• The writing too directly and repetitively parallels the assignment directions

Note: Students who are good at prompt writing and provide context, follow-up questions, a voice for the AI, etc., may not produce writing that exhibits these flaws. You may also want to consider having a conversation with a student about their work and topic if you have concerns. ChatGPT-4 (a paid option) is significantly better at avoiding these style issues, and Bing Chat is powered by GPT-4 (free).

Designing Assignments to Limit AI Usage

There are ways to design assignments that can make generative AI use more difficult for students. However, as tools become more sophisticated, assignment revisions may not be enough to truly prevent students from using AI; however, these strategies are a good start.

Ask ChatGPT

Ask ChatGPT to provide assignment examples in your field that would be difficult for it to complete. Include context, specific learning outcomes, and more to get a more specific list of suggestions. Prompt Example:

• You are a professor for an introductory course in {subject area} at the college level. You are trying to design assignments that would be tricky for students to use AI to complete. What are some assignment ideas and topics within the field that would be difficult for Bard to complete successfully?
• You are a professor for a college statistics course. Students are expected to recognize and be able to explain the central role of variability in the field of statistics. They also must be able to find variability when interpreting data. What are some course assignments that students can complete to show they have met these objectives and that are difficult for ChatGPT to complete? Explain how the assignment will help students demonstrate their understanding and what makes it complicated for a generative AI tool like ChatGPT. See the results here!

Require Specific Data Sources to be Used in the Assignment

ChatGPT is not connected to the web. It’s a “pretrained” tool that has not been trained on information post-2021. So, incorporating specific texts into assignments can make things more difficult for ChatGPT. You can ask students to write and cite sources/text from specific articles or videos. You can also provide data sets that students must use in their work.

Google Version History

Require that students submit written work using Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc., and use version history to validate that the writing and input occurred over time vs. in large chunks suggesting that students may have copied and pasted from another source like ChatGPT. Students have also used time stamps in Google Docs version history to exonerate themselves from false positives picked up by AI detectors.

Incorporate Student Discussion and Collaboration

In-person student discussions that reference past class activities, readings done outside of class, previous lectures, and so on can be integrated into your course. Examples:

• Ask students in a chemistry course to compare and contrast two models that they read about for homework or that were shared in a recorded lecture. Ask students to come up with examples in class (or on a discussion board) with a partner based on the reading assignment.
• Use Perusall and set the auto-grading (ai-assisted) feature to highly weight active engagement time and getting responses. Manually grade and let students know that credit comes from their in-text conversations with each other.

Reflective Assignments

AI tools are not truly reflective and aren’t likely (even fictionally) to make good connections between course content and personal experience or learnings. Examples:

• Write a reflection on a time when you struggled with a {subject area} concept. What was the concept? How did you eventually understand it? What advice would you give to other students who are struggling with the same concept?
• Compare and contrast two different ways of solving a problem {in your content area}. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method? When would you use one method over the other?

Real-World & Localized Connections in Assignments

Some AI tools are not connected to the internet and will not have an understanding of local references or the most recent sources. Others may not be able to draw connections that make sense to humans who understand those “smaller” contexts. For example, we asked Bard to write a short story set in a modern-day context in Raleigh, North Carolina on the NC State Campus and gave it some specific guidelines. In addition to writing a formulaic story , Bard regularly referenced “The Old Well” which is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Prompt example:

• Analyze the impact of a recent policy change {content-specific} or ask students to choose a policy change that has been implemented in the last year. Research the policy change and its implications for the economy. Write a report that includes the expected impact, strengths and weaknesses of the change, and recommendations for how the policy change could be improved.

Take Assignments through a Process

Asking students to complete an assignment with a process including steps like brainstorming, mapping, drafting, peer review, an interview, and a final product can make it difficult for them to find successful ways to use AI. It may be able to help students with sections of the assignment but not the entire product or process. You can also ask students process-oriented questions along the way. You can also include ambiguous questions or those that require positions on controversial topics. Examples:

• Compare your answers to your team’s answers. Discuss any differences.
• Explain the process you followed to arrive at your conclusion.
• Analyze the ethical implications of each step in the process and propose alternatives if necessary.
• Explain the long-term consequences of implementing this process and how they might evolve over time.
• Discuss the role of creativity and innovation in…
• Identify potential biases, assumptions, and problems that could arise and suggest methods to mitigate them.

Retrieval Practice Activities

Retrieval practice activities allow students to practice recalling information from class activities, lectures, readings, and so on. If specific to course content, AI would not be helpful in these activities (particularly if completed in person). More on retrieval practice .

Multi-Step with a Creative Component

Create projects in which students demonstrate their learning. Essentially find ways to ask them to take what they’ve learned, organize it, and make something with it. Examples:

• Short story writing in which students must use content information, specific vocabulary, and maybe even primary sources to craft a story.
• Ask students to create a comic strip based on a concept, vocabulary, a reading, etc.
• Students creating a public service announcement video to demonstrate learning

Blended Instruction or Flipping

You may also want to consider using blended or flipping formats for your course in order to limit AI use. In this model, students would learn content outside of class time and then use class time for the application of what they learned.

Designing Assignments to Work with AI

AI tools are likely to be used by students in future careers and likely in their coursework, so one approach is to incorporate the tools directly and intentionally into assignments and activities.

“Am I going to teach students to write or to write with AI tools like ChatGPT? Derek Bruff

Consider these assignment reflection questions from Derek Bruff’s article “Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age.”

• Why does this assignment make sense for this course?
• What are the specific learning objectives for this assignment?
• How might students use AI tools while working on this assignment?
• How might AI undercut the goals of this assignment? How could you mitigate this?
• How might AI enhance the assignment? Where would students need help figuring that out?
• Focus on the process. How could you make the assignment more meaningful for students or support them more in the work?

Consider these ideas for assignments that can work with AI tools:

• Use AI to generate multiple explanations for a concept and ask students to critique the AI-generated explanations. Ask them to cite/use specific course readings, notes from lectures, etc., in their critiques.
• Save time in reviewing student writing by asking them or requiring them first to get an AI review of their work, then reflect on the review, make edits, and then submit their final work.
• Include an AI tool in a “Think-Pair-Share” activity in class. Students pair with another person in class and then with an AI tool.
• Ask students to predict what responses they will get from AI to specific course content questions, problem sets, etc.
• Provide several responses from AI and ask students to make a better or different product using those drafts/responses. They might make a mind map from a narrative created by AI and then find three additional sources to support or expand on different sections of the mind map.
• Assign a peer teaching project in which students will teach a concept or review a concept for their peers. Encourage students to get help from AI with the content and in designing a short activity that can be done as part of the peer teaching. Make students responsible for answering questions from peers and instructors. Use any gaps to adjust your own teaching.
• Ask students to debate an AI tool — students on one side and ChatGPT on the other.
• Ask students to find evidence for an AI-created “main points” of an article. First, copy and paste an article into ChatGPT (or a link to an article into Bing or Bard) and ask the tool to summarize the key points of the article. Then provide that to students and ask them to find quotes or details that expand on each point.

NC State Office of Faculty Excellence: Navigating the Landscape of Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Writing Instructors –> Tim Laquintano, Carly Schnitzler, and Annette Vee — TextGenEd: An Introduction to Teaching With Text Generation Technologies (Assignment examples for AI Literacy, Creative Explorations, Ethical Considerations, and more – access at the bottom of the article)

Writing Instructors –> Anna Mills (Curator). AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing: Starting Points For Inquiry

AI Writing Detection: Red Flags

Ethan & Lilach Mollick — Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts

Ethan Mollick — Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class and The Homework Apocalypse  

Jeffrey Young — EdSurge Instructors Rush to Do ‘Assignment Makeovers’ to Respond to ChatGPT” 

Derek Bruff

• Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age: Essay Edition
• Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age: Reading Response Edition

Tyler Cowen & Alexander Tabarook How to Learn & Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT

Sam Lau & Philip Guo Teaching Programming in the Age of ChatGPT – O’Reilly  

AI Prompts for Teaching  

Impact Research: K-12 Teachers & Students ChatGPT Use

Torrey Trust — Essential Considerations for Addressing the Possibility of AI-Driven Cheating, Part 1 | Faculty Focus  

Ideas to Limit AI Use in Assignments from Google Bard  

Educause Review: Artificial Intelligence

An introduction to prompting generative AI like ChatGPT for teaching and learning  

ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education – Ditch That Textbook

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning (PDF)  

Rethinking your Problem Sets in the World of Generative AI – MIT

Hybrid Teaching: Best Practices

Blended Learning | Columbia CTL  

How We Use AI to Enhance Your Writing | Grammarly 

30 AI tools for the classroom – Ditch That Textbook  

College of Education ChatGPT Resources

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Designing assignments.

Making a few revisions to your writing assignments can make a big difference in the writing your students will produce. The most effective changes involve specifying what you would like students to do in the assignment and suggesting concrete steps students can take to achieve that goal.

Clarify what you want your students to do…and why they’re doing it

Kerry Walk, former director of the Princeton Writing Program, offers these principles to consider when designing a writing assignment (condensed and adapted from the original): “At least one sentence on your assignment sheet should explicitly state what you want students to do. The assignment is usually signaled by a verb, such as “analyze,” “assess,” “explain,” or “discuss.” For example, in a history course, after reading a model biography, students were directed as follows: ‘Your assignment is to write your own biographical essay on Mao, using Mao’s reminiscences (as told to a Western journalist), speeches, encyclopedia articles, a medical account from Mao’s physician, and two contradictory obituaries.’ In addition, including a purpose for the assignment can provide crucial focus and guidance. Explaining to students why they’re doing a particular assignment can help them grasp the big picture—what you’re trying to teach them and why learning it is worthwhile. For example, ‘This assignment has three goals: for you to (1) see how the concepts we’ve learned thus far can be used in a different field from economics, (2) learn how to write about a model, and (3) learn to critique a model or how to defend one.’”

Link course writing goals to assignments

Students are more likely to understand what you are asking them to do if the assignment re-uses language that you’ve already introduced in class discussions, in writing activities, or in your Writing Guide. In the assignment below, Yale professor Dorlores Hayden uses writing terms that have been introduced in class:

Choose your home town or any other town or city you have lived in for at least a year. Based upon the readings on the history of transportation, discuss how well or how poorly pedestrian, horse-drawn, steam- powered, and electric transportation might have served your town or city before the gasoline automobile. (If you live in a twentieth-century automobile-oriented suburb, consider rural transportation patterns before the car and the suburban houses.) How did topography affect transportation choices? How did transportation choices affect the local economy and the built environment? Length, 1000 words (4 typed pages plus a plan of the place and/or a photograph). Be sure to argue a strong thesis and back it up with quotations from the readings as well as your own analysis of the plan or photograph.

Give students methods for approaching their work

Strong writing assignments not only identify a clear writing task, they often provide suggestions for how students might begin to accomplish the task. In order to avoid overloading students with information and suggestions, it is often useful to separate the assignment prompt and the advice for approaching the assignment. Below is an example of this strategy from one of Yale’s English 114 sections:

Assignment: In the essays we have read so far, a debate has emerged over what constitutes cosmopolitan practice , loosely defined as concrete actions motivated by a cosmopolitan philosophy or perspective. Using these readings as evidence, write a 5-6-page essay in which you make an argument for your own definition of effective cosmopolitan practice.

Method: In order to develop this essay, you must engage in a critical conversation with the essays we have read in class. In creating your definition of cosmopolitan practice, you will necessarily draw upon the ideas of these authors. You must show how you are building upon, altering, or working in opposition to their ideas and definitions through your quotation and analysis of their concepts and evidence.

Questions to consider:  These questions are designed to prompt your thinking. You do not need to address all these questions in the body of your essay; instead, refer to any of these issues only as they support your ideas.

• How would you define cosmopolitan practice? How does your definition draw upon or conflict with the definitions offered by the authors we have read so far?
• What are the strengths of your definition of cosmopolitan practice? What problems does it address? How do the essays we have read support those strengths? How do those strengths address weaknesses in other writers’ arguments?
• What are the limitations or problems with your definition? How would the authors we have read critique your definition? How would you respond to those critiques?

Case Study: A Sample Writing Assignment and Revision

A student responding to the following assignment felt totally at sea, with good reason:

Write an essay describing the various conceptions of property found in your readings and the different arguments for and against the distribution of property and the various justifications of, and attacks on, ownership. Which of these arguments has any merits? What is the role of property in the various political systems discussed? The essay should concentrate on Hobbes, Locke, and Marx.

“How am I supposed to structure the essay?” the student asked. “Address the first question, comparing the three guys? Address the second question, doing the same, etc.? … Do I talk about each author separately in terms of their conceptions of the nation, and then have a section that compares their arguments, or do I have a 4 part essay which is really 4 essays (two pages each) answering each question? What am I going to put in the intro, and the conclusion?” Given the tangle of ideas presented in the assignment, the student’s panic and confusion are understandable.

A better-formulated assignment poses significant challenges, but one of them is not wondering what the instructor secretly wants. Here’s a possible revision, which follows the guidelines suggested above:

[Course Name and Title]

[Instructor’s Name]

Due date: Thursday, February 24, at 11:10am in section

Length: 5-6pp. double-spaced

Limiting your reading to the sourcebook, write a comparative analysis of Hobbes’s, Locke’s, and Marx’s conceptions of property.

The purpose of this assignment is to help you synthesize some difficult political theory and identify the profound differences among some key theorists.

The best papers will focus on a single shared aspect of the theorists’ respective political ideologies, such as how property is distributed, whether it should be owned, or what role it serves politically. The best papers will not only focus on a specific topic, but will state a clear and arguable thesis about it (“the three authors have differing conceptions of property” is neither) and go on to describe and assess the authors’ viewpoints clearly and concisely.

Note that this revised assignment is now not only clearer than the original; it also requires less regurgitation and more sustained thought.

For more information about crafting and staging your assignments, see “ The Papers We Want to Read ” by Linda Simon, Social Studies; Jan/Feb90, Vol. 81 Issue 1, p37, 3p. (The link to Simon’s article will only work if your computer is on the Yale campus.) See also the discussion of Revising Assignments in the section of this website on Addressing Plagiarism .

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Designing Creative Assignments: Examples of Journal Assignments and a Creative Project

• First Online: 12 October 2012

Cite this chapter

• Heather T. Snyder 4  

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I define “creative assignments” and discuss their benefits. I then describe the creative assignments used in my Psychology of Creativity and the Arts course as examples. The chapter includes the rationale, objectives, and student feedback for the creative journal assignments and course creative project.

Author Note:

This chapter is based on my presentation that was part of the Teaching Creatively: Examples from the Teaching of Psychology of Creativity Symposium at the 2010 American Psychological Association Annual Convention, San Diego, CA. I am very grateful for the wonderfully supportive responses I received at the Convention. I thank everyone who shared their ideas in response to my post to the electronic mailing lists for APA Division 2 and APA Division 10 on April 6, 2006 requesting suggestions for my (at the time) new course. The discussion threads inspired me to go further in my consideration of creative assignments. The assignments discussed in this chapter build upon and synthesize various suggestions and published examples; any unidentified similarities are unintentional. Finally, I thank my students for their feedback.

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Due to space limitations, I am only able to discuss one assignment here. If interested, contact me via email at [email protected] for the full journal assignment handout.

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Snyder, H.T. (2013). Designing Creative Assignments: Examples of Journal Assignments and a Creative Project. In: Gregerson, M., Kaufman, J., Snyder, H. (eds) Teaching Creatively and Teaching Creativity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5185-3_12

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Designing Engaging Assignments

Three tips for coming up with work that sparks real engagement in your students.

As I contemplated the writing assignment for our required reading of The Odyssey , I was filled with dread at the thought of reading 120 uninspired essays in which my ninth graders would dutifully recount details from the epic. Essay grading is tedious work, and I’m convinced that the hours we spend grading papers are the least effective way to positively impact students.

So I considered a framing question from the first edition of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design : “To what extent does the idea, topic, or process represent a ‘big idea’ having enduring value beyond the classroom?”

I decided that the enduring value students should get from the assignment was not directly about The Odyssey at all—I wanted them to recognize how the literary archetypes we had studied in connection with the epic are found in other stories. From there, I wanted them to realize that understanding how archetypes work could help them form a deeper appreciation of the people around them.

I challenged myself with the questions: “How do I design a meaningful assignment around this big idea that engages students?” and “How do I get kids to understand the value of the work we do?”

Designing an Engaging Assignment

1. Provide choices: According to teacher and blogger  Larry Ferlazzo , “Teachers in the real world recognize that although personalization has the potential to improve learning, our first job in applying any approach is to engage students in the learning process.... It’s about helping students find their spark and make their own fire.” 

In order to ignite students’ interest, I asked them to identify a familiar archetype from a book, movie, or television show of their choice. They would then determine how the character breaks the archetypal mold, and write a response to analyze and explain their findings.

The students were initially skeptical and asked questions like, “So we’re just doing this to brainstorm, and then we’re writing our papers about The Odyssey , right?” I had to work to convince them that they really could write the whole paper about a story of their choosing.

The students’ ability to make their own choices generated an explosion of ideas. A few of my Harry Potter aficionados stopped in excitedly at lunch to share their insights, and there were heated discussions about the myriad ways in which Harry Potter breaks the mold of the hero archetype: “He can’t make a rational decision, so Hermione has to tell him what to do!”

A student who used to love The Magic School Bus series questioned Miss Frizzle’s role as a “teacher as a heroic figure”: “Doesn’t she actually repeatedly risk students’ lives?”

When we paid closer attention to television and films, students noticed a high school chemistry teacher who cooked meth, and how Superman, in the movie Man of Steel , was bullied as a child and felt isolated as he tried to suppress his powers.

2. Offer a challenge: Students persevere when an assignment is not only interesting, but intellectually demanding. When John Hattie lists factors that relate to student achievement, he indicates the importance of ensuring that each assignment has the optimal level of challenge—not too hard, not too easy—because “the effect size of this so-called ‘ Goldilocks ’ level of challenge... nearly doubles the speed of learning.”

Our study of archetypes introduced students to a concept they hadn’t before considered. They were generally able to identify a character’s archetype, but struggled to articulate the specific ways their character broke the mold.

One student was perplexed by the conflicting realities about Betty Cooper, the “good girl” from the series Riverdale . She ultimately realized that despite Betty’s good intentions, her impulsive and often careless behavior reveals that she is much more complex than her blond hair and seemingly perfect exterior lead viewers to expect.

3. Tell them why: According to best-selling author Daniel Pink , “research has shown that people do better at a task—whether that task is spelling, hitting a curveball, or playing the viola—if they know why they’re doing it in the first place. School is often all about how—here’s how you do a quadratic equation, here’s how you write a five-paragraph essay, here’s how you do a paper chromatography experiment in chemistry. The fact is, we often give short shrift to why.”

I explained to students that people, like archetypal characters, are complex. One purpose of studying archetypes is to remind us that our tendency to generalize and stereotype is often incorrect. We may think, “Oh, that person is a jock—he couldn’t possibly be good at math” or “She’s so pretty and popular—life must be so easy for her.”

Noticing how superheroes suffer with feelings of isolation and so-called good girls really aren’t so perfect after all reinforces the fact that we cheat ourselves and others when we label people based on appearances and false assumptions. My students know that we studied literary archetypes to gain a deeper understanding of why we must not judge people based on appearances.

Preparing Students for the Real World

Classroom assignments should provide students with the opportunity to make informed choices, struggle through challenging tasks, and draw their own conclusions so they can transfer these essential skills to their lives outside of school. We can foster our students’ independence in these areas by designing assignments that matter.

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Designing Assessments of Student Learning

Image Hollie Nyseth Brehm, ​​​​​Associate Professor, Department of Sociology  Professor Hollie Nyseth Brehm was a graduate student the first time she taught a class, “I didn’t have any training on how to teach, so I assigned a final paper and gave them instructions: ‘Turn it in at the end of course.’ That was sort of it.” Brehm didn’t have a rubric or a process to check in with students along the way. Needless to say, the assignment didn’t lead to any major breakthroughs for her students. But it was a learning experience for Brehm. As she grew her teaching skills, she began to carefully craft assignments to align to course goals, make tasks realistic and meaningful, and break down large assignments into manageable steps. "Now I always have rubrics. … I always scaffold the assignment such that they’ll start by giving me their paper topic and a couple of sources and then turn in a smaller portion of it, and we write it in pieces. And that leads to a much better learning experience for them—and also for me, frankly, when I turn to grade it .”

Reflect  

Have you ever planned a big assignment that didn’t turn out as you’d hoped? What did you learn, and how would you design that assignment differently now? 

What are students learning in your class? Are they meeting your learning outcomes? You simply cannot answer these questions without assessment of some kind.

As educators, we measure student learning through many means, including assignments, quizzes, and tests. These assessments can be formal or informal, graded or ungraded. But assessment is not simply about awarding points and assigning grades. Learning is a process, not a product, and that process takes place during activities such as recall and practice. Assessing skills in varied ways helps you adjust your teaching throughout your course to support student learning

Research tells us that our methods of assessment don’t only measure how much students have learned. They also play an important role in the learning process. A phenomenon known as the “testing effect” suggests students learn more from repeated testing than from repeated exposure to the material they are trying to learn (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). While exposure to material, such as during lecture or study, helps students store new information, it’s crucial that students actively practice retrieving that information and putting it to use. Frequent assessment throughout a course provides students with the practice opportunities that are essential to learning.

In addition we can’t assume students can transfer what they have practiced in one context to a different context. Successful transfer of learning requires understanding of deep, structural features and patterns that novices to a subject are still developing (Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Bransford & Schwartz, 1999). If we want students to be able to apply their learning in a wide variety of contexts, they must practice what they’re learning in a wide variety of contexts .

Providing a variety of assessment types gives students multiple opportunities to practice and demonstrate learning. One way to categorize the range of assessment options is as formative or summative.

Formative and Summative Assessment

Opportunities not simply to practice, but to receive feedback on that practice, are crucial to learning (Ambrose et al., 2010). Formative assessment facilitates student learning by providing frequent low-stakes practice coupled with immediate and focused feedback. Whether graded or ungraded, formative assessment helps you monitor student progress and guide students to understand which outcomes they’ve mastered, which they need to focus on, and what strategies can support their learning. Formative assessment also informs how you modify your teaching to better meet student needs throughout your course.

Technology Tip

Design quizzes in CarmenCanvas to provide immediate and useful feedback to students based on their answers. Learn more about setting up quizzes in Carmen. 

Summative assessment measures student learning by comparing it to a standard. Usually these types of assessments evaluate a range of skills or overall performance at the end of a unit, module, or course. Unlike formative assessment, they tend to focus more on product than process. These high-stakes experiences are typically graded and should be less frequent (Ambrose et al., 2010).

Using Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a common framework for thinking about how students can demonstrate their learning on assessments, as well as for articulating course and lesson learning outcomes .

Benjamin Bloom (alongside collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl) published Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in 1956.   The taxonomy provided a system for categorizing educational goals with the intent of aiding educators with assessment. Commonly known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, the framework has been widely used to guide and define instruction in both K-12 and university settings. The original taxonomy from 1956 included a cognitive domain made up of six categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as “skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice. 

A revised Bloom's Taxonomy from 2001 updated these six categories to reflect how learners interact with knowledge. In the revised version, students can:  Remember content, Understand ideas, Apply information to new situations, Analyze relationships between ideas, Evaluate information to justify perspectives or decisions, and Create new ideas or original work. In the graphic pictured here, the categories from the revised taxonomy are imagined as the layers of a cake.

Assessing students on a variety of Bloom's categories will give you a better sense of how well they understand your course content. The taxonomy can be a helpful guide to predicting which tasks will be most difficult for students so you can provide extra support where it is needed. It can also be used to craft more transparent assignments and test questions by honing in on the specific skills you want to assess and finding the right language to communicate exactly what you want students to do.  See the Sample Bloom's Verbs in the Examples section below.

Diving deeper into Bloom's Taxonomy

Like most aspects of our lives, activities and assessments in today’s classroom are inextricably linked with technology. In 2008, Andrew Churches extended Bloom’s Taxonomy to address the emerging changes in learning behaviors and opportunities as “technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous.” Consult Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy for ideas on using digital tools to facilitate and assess learning across the six categories of learning.

Did you know that the cognitive domain (commonly referred to simply as Bloom's Taxonomy) was only one of three domains in the original Bloom's Taxonomy (1956)? While it is certainly the most well-known and widely used, the other two domains— psychomotor and affective —may be of interest to some educators. The psychomotor domain relates to physical movement, coordination, and motor skills—it might apply to the performing arts or other courses that involve movement, manipulation of objects, and non-discursive communication like body language. The affective domain pertains to feelings, values, motivations, and attitudes and is used more often in disciplines like medicine, social work, and education, where emotions and values are integral aspects of learning. Explore the full taxonomy in  Three Domains of Learning: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (Hoque, 2017).

In Practice

Consider the following to make your assessments of student learning effective and meaningful.

Align assignments, quizzes, and tests closely to learning outcomes.

It goes without saying that you want students to achieve the learning outcomes for your course. The testing effect implies, then, that your assessments must help them retrieve the knowledge and practice the skills that are relevant to those outcomes.

Plan assessments that measure specific outcomes for your course. Instead of choosing quizzes and tests that are easy to grade or assignment types common to your discipline, carefully consider what assessments will best help students practice important skills. When assignments and feedback are aligned to learning outcomes, and you share this alignment with students, they have a greater appreciation for your course and develop more effective strategies for study and practice targeted at achieving those outcomes (Wang, et al., 2013).

Provide authentic learning experiences.

Consider how far removed from “the real world” traditional assessments like academic essays, standard textbook problems, and multiple-choice exams feel to students. In contrast, assignments that are authentic resemble real-world tasks. They feel relevant and purposeful, which can increase student motivation and engagement (Fink, 2013). Authentic assignments also help you assess whether students will be able to transfer what they learn into realistic contexts beyond your course.

Integrate assessment opportunities that prepare students to be effective and successful once they graduate, whether as professionals, as global citizens, or in their personal lives.

To design authentic assignments:

• Choose real-world content . If you want students to be able to apply disciplinary methods, frameworks, and terminology to solve real-world problems after your course, you must have them engage with real-world examples, procedures, and tools during your course. Include actual case studies, documents, data sets, and problems from your field in your assessments.
• Target a real-world audience . Ask students to direct their work to a tangible reader, listener or viewer, rather than to you. For example, they could write a blog for their peers or create a presentation for a future employer.
• Use real-world formats . Have students develop content in formats used in professional or real-life discourse. For example, instead of a conventional paper, students could write an email to a colleague or a letter to a government official, develop a project proposal or product pitch for a community-based company, post a how-to video on YouTube, or create an infographic to share on social media.

Simulations, role plays, case studies, portfolios, project-based learning, and service learning are all great avenues to bring authentic assessment into your course.

Make sure assignments are achievable.

Your students juggle coursework from several classes, so it’s important to be conscious of workload. Assign tasks they can realistically handle at a given point in the term. If it takes you three hours to do something, it will likely take your students six hours or more. Choose assignments that assess multiple learning outcomes from your course to keep your grading manageable and your feedback useful (Rayner et al., 2016).

Scaffold assignments so students can develop knowledge and skills over time.

For large assignments, use scaffolding to integrate multiple opportunities for feedback, reflection, and improvement. Scaffolding means breaking a complex assignment down into component parts or smaller progressive tasks over time. Practicing these smaller tasks individually before attempting to integrate them into a completed assignment supports student learning by reducing the amount of information they need to process at a given time (Salden et al., 2006).

Scaffolding ensures students will start earlier and spend more time on big assignments. And it provides you more opportunities to give feedback and guidance to support their ultimate success. Additionally, scaffolding can draw students’ attention to important steps in a process that are often overlooked, such as planning and revision, leading them to be more independent and thoughtful about future work.

A familiar example of scaffolding is a research paper. You might ask students to submit a topic or thesis in Week 3 of the semester, an annotated bibliography of sources in Week 6, a detailed outline in Week 9, a first draft on which they can get peer feedback in Week 11, and the final draft in the last week of the semester.

Your course journey is decided in part by how you sequence assignments. Consider where students are in their learning and place assignments at strategic points throughout the term. Scaffold across the course journey by explaining how each assignment builds upon the learning achieved in previous ones (Walvoord & Anderson, 2011). 

Be transparent about assignment instructions and expectations. 

Communicate clearly to students about the purpose of each assignment, the process for completing the task, and the criteria you will use to evaluate it before they begin the work. Studies have shown that transparent assignments support students to meet learning goals and result in especially large increases in success and confidence for underserved students (Winkelmes et al., 2016).

To increase assignment transparency:

• Explain how the assignment links to one or more course learning outcomes . Understanding why the assignment matters and how it supports their learning can increase student motivation and investment in the work.
• Outline steps of the task in the assignment prompt . Clear directions help students structure their time and effort. This is also a chance to call out disciplinary standards with which students are not yet familiar or guide them to focus on steps of the process they often neglect, such as initial research.
• Provide a rubric with straightforward evaluation criteria . Rubrics make transparent which parts of an assignment you care most about. Sharing clear criteria sets students up for success by giving them the tools to self-evaluate and revise their work before submitting it. Be sure to explain your rubric, and particularly to unpack new or vague terms; for example, language like "argue," “close reading,” "list significant findings," and "document" can mean different things in different disciplines. It is helpful to show exemplars and non-exemplars along with your rubric to highlight differences in unacceptable, acceptable, and exceptional work.

Engage students in reflection or discussion to increase assignment transparency. Have them consider how the assessed outcomes connect to their personal lives or future careers. In-class activities that ask them to grade sample assignments and discuss the criteria they used, compare exemplars and non-exemplars, engage in self- or peer-evaluation, or complete steps of the assignment when you are present to give feedback can all support student success.

Technology Tip   

Enter all  assignments and due dates  in your Carmen course to increase transparency. When assignments are entered in Carmen, they also populate to Calendar, Syllabus, and Grades areas so students can easily track their upcoming work. Carmen also allows you to  develop rubrics  for every assignment in your course. 

Sample Bloom’s Verbs

Building a question bank, using the transparent assignment template, sample assignment: ai-generated lesson plan.

Include frequent low-stakes assignments and assessments throughout your course to provide the opportunities for practice and feedback that are essential to learning. Consider a variety of formative and summative assessment types so students can demonstrate learning in multiple ways. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to determine—and communicate—the specific skills you want to assess.

Remember that effective assessments of student learning are:

• Aligned to course learning outcomes
• Authentic, or resembling real-world tasks
• Achievable and realistic
• Scaffolded so students can develop knowledge and skills over time
• Transparent in purpose, tasks, and criteria for evaluation
• Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty (book)
• Cheating Lessons (book)
• Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology (book)
• Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning (video)
• TILT Higher Ed Examples and Resource (website)
• Writing to Learn: Critical Thinking Activities for Any Classroom (guide)

Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., Lovett, M.C., DiPietro, M., & Norman, M.K. (2010).  How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching . John Wiley & Sons. 

Barnett, S.M., & Ceci, S.J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer.  Psychological Bulletin , 128 (4). 612–637.  doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.612  

Bransford, J.D, & Schwartz, D.L. (1999). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with multiple implications.  Review of Research in Education , 24 . 61–100.  doi.org/10.3102/0091732X024001061  

Fink, L. D. (2013).  Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses . John Wiley & Sons. 

Karpicke, J.D., & Roediger, H.L., III. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning.  Science ,  319 . 966–968.  doi.org/10.1126/science.1152408  

Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help?.  Psychological Science in the Public Interest ,  17 (1), 4-34.  doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267     

Salden, R.J.C.M., Paas, F., van Merriënboer, J.J.G. (2006). A comparison of approaches to learning task selection in the training of complex cognitive skills.  Computers in Human Behavior , 22 (3). 321–333.  doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2004.06.003  

Walvoord, B. E., & Anderson, V. J. (2010).  Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment in college . John Wiley & Sons. 

Wang, X., Su, Y., Cheung, S., Wong, E., & Kwong, T. (2013). An exploration of Biggs’ constructive alignment in course design and its impact on students’ learning approaches.  Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education , 38 (4). 477–491.  doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2004.06.003  

Winkelmes, M., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Weavil, K.H. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students’ success.  Peer Review , 18 (1/2). 31–36. Retrieved from  https://www.aacu.org/peerreview/2016/winter-spring/Winkelmes

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Best Practices for Designing Effective Rubrics

By Philip Arcuria & Maryrose Chaaban

Rubrics: A Definition

Rubrics have become a highly touted and ubiquitous tool in the proverbial assessment toolbox of higher education instructors. Rubrics can provide a wide range of benefits, from providing consistent feedback to students to decreasing overall grading time.

So, what is a rubric? Formally defined, a rubric is a “…coherent set of criteria for students’ work that includes descriptions of levels of performance quality on the criteria” (Brookhart, 2013, p. 4). In short, rubrics distinguish between levels of student performance on a given activity.

More broadly, a rubric is an evaluation tool that has three distinguishing features: evaluative criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy (Popham, 2000).

• Evaluative criteria represent the dimensions on which a student activity or artifact (e.g., an assignment) is evaluated.
• Quality definitions comprise qualitative descriptions that distinguish student performance across a continuum for a given criterion.
• The scoring strategy articulates the process of converting the qualitative evaluations of student performance related to each criterion into an overall judgement of the quality of the artifact.

Benefits of a Rubric

Rubrics can be used to provide objective, meaningful, and substantive feedback on a variety of assignments including papers, presentations, discussions, and projects. A carefully designed rubric can provide benefits to instructors and students alike.

Rubrics can help instructors:

• reduce the amount of time spent grading
• ensure consistency and objectivity in grading
• reduce uncertainty and complaints about grades
• adjust instruction or provide additional resources based on the overall performance of an entire class

Rubrics can also help students:

• understand an instructor’s expectations on an assignment
• understand how the assignment aligns to the course objectives
• improve their performance by integrating instructor feedback
• evaluate their own work

Getting Started with Designing a Rubric

There are two main types of rubrics instructors can design: holistic rubrics and analytic rubrics. Holistic rubrics provide one overall score and do not provide students with feedback on how they performed on each individual assignment criterion. Conversely, analytic rubrics provide students with a score on each criterion. This article focuses on analytic rubrics, which tend to be preferable for formative assessments given they provide students with specific guidance and feedback related to each relevant criterion (Brookhart, 2013).

Analytic rubrics can be broken down into three parts:

• Performance criteria are the factors being measured (e.g., Organization of Essay , Thesis Statement , etc.) and are commonly represented as the rows of a rubric.
• Performance levels represent gradations of performance and typically take the form of the column headings of a rubric. The performance labels can be numeric (e.g., 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) or textual (e.g., Poor , Acceptable , Good , Excellent ).
• Performance level descriptors articulate observable characteristics of performance for the intersection of a given criteria and performance level and comprise the cells of a rubric.

Best Practices when Designing Rubric

One of the first steps in designing a quality rubric is to identify the skills and knowledge students should demonstrate in the assignment based on the overall course or module learning objectives.

Building off of the recommendations of van Leusen (2013), you can use the following questions to get started:

• What knowledge and skills is the assignment designed to assess? (Learning Objective)
• What observable criteria represent those knowledge and skills? (Performance Criteria)
• How can you best divide those criteria to represent distinct and meaningful levels of student performance? (Performance Levels)
• What observable characteristics of students’ work differentiate among the performance levels for each criterion? (Performance Level Descriptors)

Addressing these questions can go a long way in helping you pinpoint the criteria you should include in a high-quality rubric. Once you have identified your criteria, you can start designing your rubric. Generally speaking, a high-quality analytic rubric should:

• Consist of 3-5 performance levels (Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).
• Include two or more performance criteria, and the labels for the criteria should be distinct, clear, and meaningful (Brookhart, 2013; Nitko & Brookhart, 2007; Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).
• Include performance level descriptors that: distinguish between qualitative differences in performance that are observable and measurable; are consistent within each criterion; and clearly articulate the expectations for each performance level (Banta & Palomba, 2015; Brookhart, 2013; Nitko & Brookhart, 2007; Popham, 2000; Suskie, 2009).

Evaluating Your Rubric

Once you have created a rubric, you can use the following checklist to evaluate its level of quality. This checklist is based on research by the ASU EdPlus Action Lab , where it is used for automated scoring of rubrics to assess basic structure.

Click the following link to download the checklist: Analytic Rubric Checklist

Examples of Exemplary Rubrics

The Association of American Colleges and Universities created a series of high-quality rubrics entitled VALUE rubrics that span intellectual and practical skills (i.e. critical thinking, written communication, teamwork), personal and social responsibility (i.e. civic engagement, global learning, and ethical reasoning), and integrative learning.

These rubrics are open source and available to download directly from their website. To view these rubrics, please visit the Association of American Colleges and Universities – VALUE Rubrics .

Additional Resources

Here is a list of additional resources regarding rubrics:

• Cr eating a Rubric in Canvas – Instructure
• Creating and Using Rubrics – Carnegie Melon University Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation
• Designing Scoring Rubrics for Your Classroom – Journal of Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation
• Developing and Using Rubrics – Office of Academic Assessment, The University of Oklahoma
• Repository of Sample Rubrics – Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education
• Rubric Development Guidelines – Yale Center for Teaching and Learning
• Scoring Rubrics: What, When, and How? – Journal of Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation

Arcuria, P., Morgan, W., & Fikes, T. G. (2019). Validating the use of LMS-derived rubric structural features to facilitate automated measurement of rubric quality. International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge.

Banta, T. W., & Palomba, C. A. (2015). Assessment essentials: planning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookhart, Susan M. (2013). How to create and use rubrics for formative assessment and grading . Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.

Nitko, A. J., & Brookhart, S. M. (2007). Educational Assessment of Students (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Popham, W. J. (2000). Modern educational measurement: Practical guidelines for educational leaders (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Suskie, L. (2009). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

van Leusen, P. (2013). Assessments with rubrics. ASU TeachOnline. Retreived from https://teachonline.asu.edu/2013/08/assessments-with-rubrics/

About the Action Lab

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Extremely well explained article! thanks

This is an extremely well done resource! Great job Phil and Mary!!

Thanks for this. The Performance Criteria — Clarity, Organization, and Mechanics — are good criteria. Clarity refers to the “What?” question: Is “what” the student engaging with clearly stated and elaborated upon? The Organization criterion refers to the “How?” question: Is the way in which the “What?” question is elaborated upon, done so in a series of connected sentences and connected paragraphs? Do these sentences and paragraphs assemble the reasons that support the “What?” question in a coherent manner? The third criterion refers to spelling errors and grammatical errors in the attempt to address both the “What?” and the “How?”. To these three criteria we may add a fourth criterion: “So what?” which refers to some Critical Thinking. Having engaged with the “thesis”, is there room now to outline the limits of the thesis. How far does the thesis go? Where does it stop? Why does it stop where it does? And so on…

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Embrace the Bot: Designing Writing Assignments in the Face of AI

• January 23, 2023
• Eric Prochaska

Just as pocket calculators, personal computers, and smartphones have posed threats to students learning math skills, AI (artificial intelligence) seems to be the new tool poised to undermine the use of writing assignments to assess student learning.

In November 2022, a tool called ChatGPT made headlines for its ability to “write” any content. As an instructional designer, I immediately heard from worried faculty that the sky may be falling, wondering what chance they had in the face of robots that could write student papers. 

After some reflection, I have come to believe that, in the long run, worrying about how students might use AI to cheat is not the most productive question to focus on. The better question is, even in the era of AI, how can we best teach our students? Below are three methods of designing writing assignments in the face of an AI incursion.

Method 1: Ignorance is bliss

On the extreme responses, we have “ignorance is bliss” and “resistance is futile” approaches. These attitudes are lumped together because both favor avoiding the core issue. In the former, an instructor may simply be unaware that students can now type a writing prompt into a website and copy the answer it generates into a document to submit. In the latter, an instructor may be aware of AI’s ability to write, but may metaphorically throw up their arms at the overwhelming notion that they can no longer know whether a student has written a submitted paper.

At worst, instructors with this mindset could resign themselves to grading work written by AI and hope most students are still writing their own papers and learning from feedback. For instructors who evaluate to help students develop their writing skills, it would be a waste of time to respond to anything their students did not write – and these students would have little invested in reviewing the feedback.

For instructors who are aware of AI’s ability to write a paper but who don’t feel ready to tackle the robot head-on, the key strategy is one already used to thwart students from passing off another’s work as their own.

• Employ plagiarism checkers. Just as we have never known for sure that a students’ classmate or sibling didn’t write their paper, we now fear we will not be able to discern if a computer has done their work. Many instructors already rely on plagiarism checkers. But while a plagiarism detector cannot tell us who wrote a paper if it is not in a database of papers to be checked against, there is now at least one plagiarism detector dedicated to sniffing out AI-generated content. If an epidemic of AI work is submitted in school, or even if instructors are convinced of the possibility, there will probably be a proliferation of tools to detect AI writing. As promising as this may sound, I want to add a caveat: In over ten years of teaching freshman English, I learned that the more I policed student work, the less energy I had to be a good teacher. Be prudent in how much effort you devote to this strategy.

Method 2: Know the enemy

Second is the “know thy enemy” approach. AI isn’t going away. It’s going to expand and improve and become more nuanced. Instead of focusing solely on detection, instructors can work to circumvent the submission of AI text in the first place. The strategies of this method rely on designing work that AI cannot perform. Here is a representative sample, in order of increasing promise.

• In-class writing. Use in-class writing prompts. The popular conception is that if you watch your students write, they can’t cheat. But in-class writing doesn’t produce every type of writing or engage every skill we want to assess. It might preclude the writing process in favor of a product and it might well assess how someone writes under pressure. Although in-class writing can successfully be adopted to measure comprehension and subject matter knowledge, it does not appear to be the best method of assessing various forms of writing.
• Writing alternatives. Assign visual organizers or other assignments instead of papers. In time, AI will probably generate any form of assignment we can devise. For now, though, instructors could measure how well a student’s thesis is supported by ideas, evidence, and arguments, and whether optimal organization is used. This could lead to presentations in place of written papers, or even collaborative writing sessions during class, if appropriate for the course outcomes.
• Topics that avoid AI’s wheelhouse. Assign highly specific prompts. AI is less likely to convincingly address prompts written with granular specificity. This is even more true if the prompt relates to a discussion that occurred in class or some other content that students encountered (guest speakers, peer presentations, field trips, in-class debates, etc.), of which the AI is not aware. If you require students to include unique and specific knowledge in their writing, AI has little chance of including the content you require.
• Writing based on human experience. Assign writing that relies on student perspective, experience, and cultural capital. This approach aligns with a diversity, equity, and inclusion model of designing writing assignments that could result in the most meaningful analysis and synthesis of information. The instructor is just as likely to learn from their students’ work as the students are. One underlying premise here is that AI will not produce texts with resonant personal perspective; but even if AI can replicate this type of writing, a second premise is that a writing assignment that invites students to share the ways in which their lives intersect with academia will motivate students to write their own papers.

Perhaps the final suggestion in this list harkens back to the “ignorance is bliss” approach, in which instructors hope students write their own papers. I see a difference, though, and suspect students will, too, in that the motivation behind the two methods is different, with the latter seeking ways to evolve and improve the student experience of the assignment.

Method 3: If you can’t beat them, join them

Finally, we have the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, in which instructors embrace the reality of AI-written content and work with their students to demystify and deconstruct the textual artifacts AI produces. This approach is best suited to classes that have ample time to perform a rhetorical analysis of AI writing and the expectations and assessments of writing assignments.

• Rhetorical analysis. Deconstruct the very act of AI writing. Discuss how AI “learns” to write. What assumptions about good writing are revealed when AI writing is analyzed? What is AI incapable of doing in its writing? Are there writing situations where AI should be more or less trusted? What is the role of the human in generating and proofreading AI text?
• Peer review. Conduct a peer review and/or class discussion of AI writing. Analyze what it writes. What content does AI include? What does it not include? How does AI organize its writing? What sentence structures does AI favor? Analyze the style in terms of voice, tone, diction, and syntax. Is there rhythm in AI language? Can the full rhetorical situation be deduced by analyzing an AI text? How could the text better address the rhetorical situation?
• Revision. Revise an AI generated text. Aside from correcting factual errors, have students experiment with re-arranging the contents of an AI written piece. Have students expand the paragraphs, combine the sentences, add support, and rewrite conclusions. Use the AI text as a starting point, as an opportunity. Students may find it difficult to improve upon “perfection,” but also may find it easier to revise the writing of a soulless program than that of their peers.
• Class presentations. Present a comparison/contrast of AI versus human writing. Without knowing the author, can students tell which text is written by a human and which by AI? Who writes better? Which writing “sounds” better? Compare line-by-line, thesis statements, voice, organization, evidence and support, arguments and logic, overall impact, and persuasiveness of the pieces.
• Refinement. Try to make AI refine its writing with a focus on the rhetorical situation. Have students compose several variations of the same prompt to fine tune the result that AI produces. Are there limits to how much we can refine the writing? Are there trade-offs of one element being sacrificed when another is included or enhanced? Have students try to dial in the rhetorical situation by adjusting for audience, purpose, voice, tone, etc. Ultimately, is it easier to have AI write the perfectly appropriate text for a specific situation or to write it on our own?

There is no wrong or right method of addressing the advent of AI in a writing class. Any instructor might employ a variety of these strategies. The ideas presented here are not exhaustive, but are offered to promote thought and add perspective. There is so much more to writing than the act of composing sentences that I do not think we need to fear AI will be the death knell of composition in education.

In fact, AI may encourage a brave new exploration of higher-order thinking skills. There are surely larger conversations to have about the role of composition courses in higher education—and of assessments in all courses—but the argument can be made that AI is a tool and students who learn to use that tool are learning a valuable skill.

In ten years, maybe Skynet will be writing everyone’s five paragraph essays and none of this will matter. Or maybe we’re panicking about another Y2K. AI will certainly still be plugging away in the next generation. We can adjust now to facilitate it doing so hand-in-hand with higher education.

Eric Prochaska taught English for over ten years before pivoting to instructional design. He currently works at Mt. Hood Community College in Oregon, where he helps faculty design online courses and activities.

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Designing Research Assignments: Assignment Ideas

• Student Research Needs
• Assignment Guidelines
• Assignment Ideas
• Scaffolding Research Assignments
• BEAM Method

Assignment Templates

Research diaries offer students an opportunity to reflect on the research process, think about how they will address challenges they encounter, and encourage students to think about and adjust their strategies. 

• Research Diary Template
• Research Diary Instructions

Alternative Assignments

There are many different types of assignments that can help your students develop their information literacy and research skills. 

The assignments listed below target different skills, and some may be more suitable for certain courses than others.

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• Last Updated: Jun 9, 2022 12:23 PM
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Designing Homework That Enhances Learning

• By Maryellen Weimer
• February 24, 2015

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Designing Jobs Right

• Roger L. Martin

It’s a given of human nature that whenever people get an assignment that they can’t or don’t want to do, they’ll make up a different one and do that instead. If a job is unchallenging, they’ll redefine it to be more interesting, and if it’s not doable, they’ll turn it into something that they can accomplish. Sometimes that works out, but mostly it doesn’t, because the job doesn’t fulfill its intended function.

Managers will be far more effective if they take time to sit down regularly with employees and explore what their job preferences are and how their tasks can be both achievable and engaging. But it’s a two-way street: Subordinates must also help design the tasks their bosses will do. If those responsibilities aren’t interesting or value-adding, the bosses will make up their own tasks—with results the subordinates may not like.

Make them challenging—but don’t overdo it.

One of my favorite Star Trek story lines is about the Kobayashi Maru training simulation for Starfleet Academy students. It was first featured in the second Star Trek movie, in 1982, and then when the movie series was rebooted, in 2009.

The all-too-common mistakes businesses make with recruiting, hiring, benefits, and job design—and how to avoid them

• Roger L. Martin is a former dean of the Rotman School of Management, an adviser to CEOs, and the author of A New Way to Think (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022).

Partner Center

• Recognize when information is required
• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
• Incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally *
• are relevant to the course, and provide enriching material for students
• encourage students to think about the type of information they need (factual, background, evaluative), and the form in which they're most likely to find it
• include retrieval of information through some finding tool such as an index, catalog, database or search engine
• ask students to look at information critically -- to evaluate it, to compare it with other information, to synthesize information from different sources, to identify the most crucial pieces of information available

Questions to ask when designing assignments:

• Does this assignment help to achieve the learning goals of the course?
• What core research skill is being addressed in this assignment, and how?
• Is this assignment integrated into the course, providing material to be used in other work within the course?
• Will this assignment serve to bring in enriching material for the students?
• Does this assignment encourage my students to think about the type of information they need (factual, background, evaluative), and the form in which they're most likely to find it?
• Does this assignment help my students distinguish among various types of information sources:  magazine articles, books, academic or research journals, personal web sites, etc?
• Does this assignment include retrieval of information through some major finding tool such as an index, catalog, database or search engine?
• Does this assignment provide meaningful practice in using tools in ways that might be helpful in other contexts?
• Does this assignment ask students to look at information critically -- to evaluate it, to compare it with other information, to synthesize information from different sources, to identify the most crucial pieces of information available?
• Is this assignment designed so that student success is feasible? Are the likely obstacles, however salutary, also surmountable?

Assignment suggestions:

• Prepare brief annotated bibliographies This assignment may ask students to retrieve a variety of sources - articles, books, personal accounts, web sites - and describe the contribution of each source to an understanding of the topic. This can help students develop a sense of the scholarly conversation around a topic.
• Retrieve and compare two sources of information on the same topic This helps students become aware of the impact that the author's background, intent and audience may have on the information presented, and may highlight the differences among various disciplines. It works particularly well when students are asked to locate deliberately disparate sources, such as an article from a popular magazine and another from an academic journal 1 , articles from conservative and liberal sources 2 , articles from different disciplines, journal articles and web sites,a personal and an organizational web site.
• Look at the treatment of a topic over time. This can build students' awareness of the process of scholarship on a topic -- what do researchers now know that they didn't know before, how might the social context of research have had impact on a topic, etc. It can work for timespans as limited as two years and as wide as a century. It may also heighten awareness that it is not enough to search the last six months in a database!
• Starting with a significant publication or event within the field, prepare a report on the people or issues involved. 3 This helps students contextualize some of the material, and begins to focus them on the research in the discipline.
• Review a major journal in the field over time. Through tracing shifts in who is published, what topics are considered of interest, what methodology is used, students develop a sense of a discipline as an evolving entity.
• Compare items retrieved by searches using two different search engines or databases. 4 Students learn that indexes, databases and even search engines may have different foci and functions. This helps them learn to make deliberate choices about which finding tool to locate information in various fields, at differing levels, or in differing formats. Searching a general database such as Academic Search Premiere and the standard indexing tool within your discipline might yield some interesting results. (Is the general database useful for an interdisciplinary approach? Are its articles more accessible? Does the specialized index do better for narrow searches?)
• Starting with a short article or announcment in the popular press, locate the original research on which the popular article was based.  Evaluate the accuracy of the announcement. 5 This highlights the distinction between popular and scholarly press, and helps students understand the differences in audience and level of authority.
• Locate and evaluate reviews of books used in the course. The focus here is on analyzing the reception of a piece of research within a field. Students can gain a sense of the conversation within a discipline by reading scholarly critiques of the material they are reading for class. The retrieval skills it teaches are fairly mechanical and straightforward, but it will acquaint students with local resources, including the basics of finding journals, etc.
• Locate and compare two contemporary accounts of an event. Heightens awareness of difference in perspective between the immediacy and detail of the contemporary account and the treatment of the event by later scholars. Students are often intrigued with old newspapers and magazines, and finding a topic, then using an index to find another article, helps them understand the use of indexes.  
• Locate and evaluate the “best” and the “worst” web site on a topic, describing the criteria used and recommending improvements for the "worst"site. Students use search engines or directories to locate web sites, and must develop criteria for judging the pertinence and reliability of the information found.
• Debates requiring outside research . This works well with controversial topics, encouraging students to support their opinions with analyses and data from the field. Requiring a bibliography of the sources they used gives practice in the mechanics of citation, and helps the instructor assess the range of materials they consulted.
• Present brief factual background to the class, introducing a new topic. Helps students identify when consulting a reference work (print or electronic) is more efficient than looking for articles or books, and helps students invest in the process of the course itself. It also can mesh well with the oral components of the seminar.
• Write or present a brief intellectual biography of a scholar identified or read in the course. Although care must be taken to select scholars who are prolific enough to leave a traceable trail, students can locate dissertations, articles and books by the individual, and trace shifts or developments in his/her interests or understanding of the field. This might be combined with checking book reviews of a scholar's work over the course of his/her career.
• Write a newspaper article on an event. The entire class can research an event, with each individual writing a news story on it. In addition to encouraging students to identify important elements and to summarize, the differences among the stories may alert students to the impact a writer's perspective has on writing.
• Prepare for a news conference with a scholar read in class, or with a figure involved in some significant event in history. 6 Students must research the scholar's or historical figure's general context to decide what questions they would want to ask, and perhaps prepare questions someone from another culture or time period might pose.
• Write a proposal for an extended research project. This asks students to do almost everything involved with writing a paper, except the actual writing: they must locate and retrieve information in the field, and analyze how it fits together and perhaps where it does not.
• Create an anthology of readings on a topic. Select a variety of resources on a topic, and write an introduction that explains how they fit together. Another twist on this (from Wesleyan University Library) is to have students assume they're unable to obtain copyright permission, and so must have a secondary list of resources, with justification for not including them in their optimal collection.
• Compare the treatment of the same topic in two different disciplines. This helps students both practice physically locating material and learn to identify the perspectives and approaches of different disciplines.  
• Locate and summarize information to support an editorial on a topic within the course. 7 This helps student identify information needs that might arise outside class, and highlights the importance of approaching opinions critically.
• Locate two scholarly articles on a topic, and compare and evaluate their bibliographies. 8 Students observe both common and unique sources across the articles, and think about the impact the quality of sources can have on the authority of the article.
• Create a profile of a species, or of a chemical compound found in a household product. 9 Familiarizes students with the common scientific reference tools, and can introduce them to scientific literature.

* Association of College and Research Libraries/ALA, Information literacy competency standards for higher education , endorsed by the American Association for Higher Education, Council of Independent Colleges, and Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 2000. 1 "Effective library assignments" <www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/infoserv/lue/effectiveassignments.html> 5/6/04. 2 K. Huber and P. Lewis, "Tired of Term Papers?" Research Strategies 2 (1984), 192-199. 3 Joseph, Miriam E. "Term Paper Alternatives." <http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/PaperAlternatives.html> 5/6/04 4 "Creating assignments." <www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/assignments.html> 5/6/04 5 VT Sapziano and JL Gibbons, "Brain chemistry and behavior: A new interdisciplinary course" Journal of Chemical Education 63 (1986), 398-399. 6 "Ideas for library assignments," <library.ups.edu/instruct/assign.htm>, 5/6/04. 7 "Creating assignments." <www.lib.unb.ca/instruction/assignments.html> 5/6/04 8 "Alternative assignments," <www.library.ohiou.edu/libinfo/depts/refdept/bi/alternatives.htm>, 5/6/04. 9 "Library assignments for lower-division science courses" <[email protected]>

• Jody Caldwell (3481, [email protected]): literature, history, religion
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• Ernie Rubinstein, Theological Librarian (3472, [email protected]): Biblical studies, theology, religion
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• Jody Caldwell (3481, [email protected]): anthropology, psychology, sociology
• Beth Patterson (3480, [email protected]): economics, political science, psychology, sociology

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MLB Trade Rumors

Marlins Outright Eli Villalobos

By Darragh McDonald | June 1, 2024 at 10:55am CDT

TODAY : The Marlins outrighted Villalobos to Triple-A after he cleared waivers, as per MLB.com’s official transactions page.  It isn’t yet known if Villalobos will accept the assignment to opt into free agency.

MAY 27 : The Marlins announced that infielder Xavier Edwards has been reinstated from the 60-day injured list and optioned to Triple-A Jacksonville. To open up a spot for him on the 40-man roster, right-hander Eli Villalobos has been designated for assignment.

Edwards, 24, battled a foot infection during Spring Training and began the season on the injured list. He has been playing in rehab games for over a week now and is healthy enough to be activated, though he only played seven games on his rehab so the club will keep him on optional assignment for regular playing time in Jacksonville. Though he won’t be joining the active roster, the Fish needed to make a corresponding 40-man move since Edwards was on the 60-day injured list, which will nudge Villalobos off his spot.

The right-handed Villalobos is about a month away from his 27th birthday. The Marlins claimed him off waivers from the Pirates last June but then passed him through waivers about a week later. He got his 40-man roster spot back earlier this month and was able to make his major league debut. He made three appearances for the Marlins, allowing one earned run in 4 1/3 innings, before being optioned back to Jacksonville about two weeks ago.

In addition to that small sample of big league action, Villalobos has also thrown 18 innings over 13 Triple-A appearances this year with a 4.50 earned run average. He has struck out 26.5% of batters faced at that level and kept 44.7% of batted balls on the ground, but he’s also walked 13.3% of hitters that have stepped to the plate.

That has generally been the recipe for Villalobos. Dating back to the start of 2021, he has tossed 196 innings in the minors with a 3.72 ERA. His 29.4% strikeout rate in that stretch is quite strong but he’s also given free passes at a 12.2% rate.

The Marlins will have a week to trade Villalobos or pass him through waivers. He can still be optioned for the rest of this year and one additional season, which could perhaps give him appeal for a club that is intrigued by the strikeouts and willing to wait to see if the control improves. If Villalobos were to pass through waivers unclaimed, he would have the right to elect free agency by virtue of his previous outright.

10 Comments

Huizinga backed off and unloaded his ’97ws champs when they still couldn’t draw fans in to watch. That team was mostly bought and paid for FA, not brought up talent and yeah.. I’ve always had a liking for the fish since they became a new franchise, less than handful of years before the title.

Alex fernandez was the only SP on that team (worth 2c) who Miami brought up. Pen was more of the same. Lineup included (best players) Sheffield, bobby bonilla, moises Alou.

best “home” talent wasn’t from the milb system they bad, but still wildly popular ‘the niner”.

that ’97 team was an NL version of george steinbrenner, buying every FA out there, then breaking it down less than a yr later in selloffs.

One of the most disapointing things was huizinga selling off a WS winner, into a team in ’98 barely winning 50g.

Always been hard to watch/root for this team because of lousy ownership and several awful gm’s along the way. That castoff title in ’97 has never been anything to brag about.

lol you literally just danced around the fact that the best pitcher in the Marlins rotation during that 97 WS run was Livan Hernandez, a homegrown player. As was Tony Saunders. Alex Hernandez didn’t even play in the playoffs. Most of their bullpen were players they either signed or acquired well before the player debuted in the majors. Even Nenn they acquired when he was an unknown.

They “bought their World Series” as much as any team in the modern era has bought theirs. Their 2003 WS team was a thing of beauty. I like the Marlins. I hate their ownerships and front offices. But I like the team and the players.

Like the fish as well, moreso than local TB Rays franchise, partly because thought huizinga was going to attempt turning them into long term winners. Only fans never saw that. Odd (2) titles, spread out 6y and totally different players.

Hernandez and saunders did both have nice post season runs, but were mostly mia for the regular season. kevin brown and alex fernandez drove that pitching thru 162g, not the to be traded and 1yr back end starter/rest of career quad A player tony saunders.

This also wasn’t some team, like ’07 rockies which went on a close to 2m streak of beating everyone. They were solid throughout that magical ’97y and guys, like fernandez and brown reason they make the post season.

Hutton and rich walz 9when he was there) used to tell things straight. Now, with hutton back after 5y layoff has become more of a cheerleader than honest on the air. disapointed in him, tho will agree when the jeter run team and ownership took over? it was a dark stain on that franchise. no wonder the nyy never gave him a job inside their front office.. it was way beyond him.

Id like to hear harry carry pronounce Villalobos on air

Fan base doesn’t show up to games unless the weather is fair

Funny stuff citazen. how many teams are ate up with fair weather fans? Miami never had much hope of drawing, especially (then) playing in joe robbie aka awful football stadium.

Tampa same way, only no matter win/lose they draw 10-15k max.

Cubs, giants, Yankees Red Sox draw well no Matter what record. Miami can’t even give tickets away in the new stadium.

18 mins ago

If Eli Villalobos is related to Heitor Villa-Lobos, maybe he can make a living playing classical guitar once his MLB career is over. And maybe if he listens enough to Bachianas Brazileiras and finds inner vibrational roots, Eli can improve his control and extend his MLB tenure.

(I do not expect anyone to understand my comment. Just showing gratitude to my Music History mentors and to the resonances of beisbol.)

One of these teams should move to Nashville!!

33 seconds ago

Eli’s going, hide your heart girl

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Pamela Paul

And Now, a Real-World Lesson for Student Activists

By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

The encampments have been cleared; campuses have emptied; protester and counterprotester alike have moved on to internships, summer gigs and in some cases, the start of their postgraduate careers.

Leaving aside what impact, if any, the protests had on global events, let’s consider the more granular effect the protests will have on the protesters’ job prospects and future careers.

Certainly, that matters, too. After all, this generation is notable for its high levels of ambition and preprofessionalism . It has tuition price tags to justify and loans to repay. A 2023 survey of Princeton seniors found that nearly 60 percent took jobs in finance, consulting, tech and engineering, up from 53 percent in 2016.

A desire to protect future professional plans no doubt factored into the protesters’ cloaking themselves in masks and kaffiyehs. According to a recent report in The Times, “The fear of long-term professional consequences has also been a theme among pro-Palestine protesters since the beginning of the war.”

Activism has played a big part in many of these young people’s lives and academic success. From the children’s books they read (“The Hate U Give,” “ I Am Malala ”) to the young role models who were honored ( Greta Thunberg , David Hogg ) to the social justice movements that were praised (Black Lives Matter, MeToo, climate justice), Gen Z-ers have been told it’s on them to clean up the boomers’ mess. Resist!

College application essays regularly ask students to describe their relationship with social justice, their leadership experience and their pet causes. “Where are you on your journey of engaging with or fighting for social justice?” asked one essay prompt Tufts offered applicants in 2022. What are you doing to ensure the planet’s future?

Across the curriculum, from the social sciences to the humanities, courses are steeped in social justice theory and calls to action. Cornell’s library publishes a study guide to a 1969 building occupation in which students armed themselves. Harvard offers a social justice graduate certificate. “Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses,” Tyler Austin Harper noted recently in The Atlantic. “Students took them at their word.”

Imagine the surprise of one freshman who was expelled from Vanderbilt after students forced their way into an administrative building. As he told The Associated Press , protesting in high school was what helped get him into college in the first place; he wrote his admission essay on organizing walkouts, and got a scholarship for activists and organizers.

Things could still work out well for many of these kids. Some professions — academia, politics, community organizing, nonprofit work — are well served by a résumé brimming with activism. But a lot has changed socially and economically since boomer activists marched from the streets to the workplace, many of them building solid middle-class lives as teachers, creatives and professionals, without crushing anxiety about student debt. In a demanding and rapidly changing economy, today’s students yearn for the security of high-paying employment.

Not all employers will look kindly on an encampment stint. When a group of Harvard student organizations signed an open letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the billionaire Bill Ackman requested on X that Harvard release the names of the students involved “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” Soon after, a conservative watchdog group posted names and photos of the students on a truck circling Harvard Square.

Calling students out for their political beliefs is admittedly creepy. But pro-Palestinian demonstrations lacked the moral clarity of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. Along with protesters demanding that Israel stop killing civilians in Gaza, others stirred fears of antisemitism by justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, shoving “Zionists” out of encampments and calling for “globalizing the intifada” and making Palestine “free from the river to the sea.”

In November, two dozen leading law firms wrote to top law schools implying that students who participated in what they called antisemitic activities, including calling for “the elimination of the state of Israel,” would not be hired. More than 100 firms have since signed on. One of those law firms, Davis Polk, rescinded job offers to students whose organizations had signed the letter Ackman criticized. Davis Polk said those sentiments were contrary to the firm’s values. Another major firm, Winston & Strawn, withdrew an offer to a student at New York University who also blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attack. In a Wall Street Journal opinion essay, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law urged employers not to hire those of his students he said were antisemitic.

Two partners at corporate law firms, who asked to speak anonymously because other partners didn’t want them to talk to the media, told me that participating in this year’s protests, especially if it involves an arrest, could easily foreclose opportunities at their firm. At one of those firms, hiring managers scan applicants’ social media histories for problems. (Well before Oct. 7, students had keyed into this possibility, scrubbing campus activism from their résumés.)

Also, employers generally want to hire people who can get along and fit into their company culture, rather than trying to agitate for change. They don’t want politics disrupting the workplace.

“There is no right answer,” Steve Cohen, a partner at the boutique litigation firm Pollock Cohen, said when I asked if protesting might count against an applicant. “But if I sense they are not tolerant of opinions that differ from their own, it’s not going to be a good fit.” (That matches my experience with Cohen, who worked on a Reagan presidential campaign and hired me, a die-hard liberal, as an editorial assistant back in 1994.)

Corporate America is fundamentally risk-averse. As The Wall Street Journal reported , companies are drawing “a red line on office activists.” Numerous employers, including Amazon, are cracking down on political activism in the workplace, The Journal reported . Google recently fired 28 people.

For decades, employers used elite colleges as a kind of human resources proxy to vet potential candidates and make their jobs easier by doing a first cut. Given that those elite schools were hotbeds of activism this year, that calculus may no longer prove as reliable. Forbes reported that employers are beginning to sour on the Ivy League. “The perception of what those graduates bring has changed. And I think it’s more related to what they’re actually teaching and what they walk away with,” an architectural firm told Forbes.

The American university has long been seen as a refuge from the real world, a sealed community unto its own. The outsize protests this past year showed that in a social media-infused, cable-news-covered world, the barrier has become more porous. What flies on campus doesn’t necessarily pass in the real world.

The toughest lesson for young people of this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Pamela Paul is an Opinion columnist at The Times, writing about culture, politics, ideas and the way we live now.

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NPTEL Course Review:

About NPTEL:

NPTEL Full Form is called “National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning”, founded by 7 IITs and 1 IISc for Quality Course Contents.

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It is a 12-week Digital IC Design course taught by Prof V . Janakiraman He explains the introduction to VLSI, digital design, sequential circuits, combinational circuits, delay etc.

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Since it is a 12-week course, the best of 8 will be calculated for the exam, which is 25 per cent. The external exam is 100 marks, which they evaluate for 75 per cent. (25 + 75) 40 percent, otherwise fail. I’m waiting for my results and hope to clear.

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Angels Recall Veteran All-Star From Rehab Assignment Due to Fluke Injury

Maren angus-coombs | may 30, 2024.

• Los Angeles Angels

The Los Angeles Angels have recalled infielder Miguel Sanó back from his rehab assignment to allow more time for the burn on his leg to heal, according to Jeff Fletcher of the Orange County Register .

Sanó was treating his left knee inflammation with a heating pack when he removed the protective barrier to make it hotter. He left it on for too long and burned himself.

Miguel Sano was returned from his rehab assignment. That burn he suffered from the heating pad did not heal. ICYMI: Miguel Sano took the protection off the heating pad to make it hotter, and burned himself. He is going back to Anaheim, with no timetable to return. — Sam Blum (@SamBlum3) May 30, 2024

Sanó hasn’t played since April 26, and it’s unclear when he’ll be healthy enough to make a return. The Angels want him to resume the rehab assignment before he's activated. He began his rehab assignment on May 22 after a stint on the 10-day injured list retroactive to April 28 with left knee inflammation.

He has played 21 games this season with a batting average of .262 in 71 at-bats, adding five RBIs and one home run.

Sanó signed a minor league contract with the Angels this spring and was invited to join the Angels in Tempe for spring training. The former All-Star had solid numbers in Cactus League play and earned a spot on the Angels Opening Day roster. Before breaking camp with the Halos, Sanó hadn't been on a major league roster since 2022.

MAREN ANGUS-COOMBS