Clear Tasks and Goals of Assessments

Explicitly stating what students will need to do to complete the assessments, the learning goals, and how they connect to the assessments help clarify expectations and motivate students. Scholarly research has found that students who received more transparent assignments reported feeling a greater sense of belonging, more confidence in their academic work, and greater mastery of key skills valued by employers compared to peers who received less transparent assignments (Winkelmes et al., 2016).

Key Features:

  • Clear articulation of what students should know and be able to do at the end of the course (i.e., intended learning outcomes)
  • Description of what students will do to complete major assessments
  • Explanation of how assessments measure student knowledge and skills that are linked to learning outcomes (i.e., alignment)

MIT Examples:

Pilot a study (30 points)
The goals of this assignment are: 1) to give you first-hand experience testing children on a novel paradigm and 2) to infer from the stimuli and design of a task the question the design is trying to answer. We will provide you with stimuli (a script and slides) by the end of the third week of class. Your job is to identify at least one parent willing to let you host and record a zoom call with their child, ages four to seven. We will run an in-class training to ensure you can implement the paradigm with high fidelity. You will collect data on these children through zoom.

You need to submit three documents:

  1. The audio recordings of your session.
  2. A 2-3 page paper, briefly reviewing the relevant literature, explaining the question you think the design is trying to answer, describing your anecdotal experience of running the design and the results from your pilot data as well as any difficulties you encountered in implementing the design, and explaining what the most interesting conclusions might be.
  3. The data you collected, using the template available in the Pilot project module. We will aggregate the data from the whole class and report the results at the end.

Let’s Talk

If you have any questions or want to talk through your syllabus, please contact Teaching + Learning Lab, GradSupport (for graduate courses), or S3 (for undergraduate courses). If you want to go deeper, please visit the TLL’s Syllabus Checklist to Support Student Belonging & Achievement, a comprehensive, evidence-based syllabus checklist which informed this resource.

Principle:

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