Assignments: Make Them Effective, Engaging, and Equitable. At their best, assignments are one of the most important learning experiences for students in a course. Students grapple with course content, ...

Effective course design begins with understanding the process of thinking and learning. These processes are commonly termed "metacognition." Metacognition includes a critical awareness of one’s ...

Many instructors approach assignment design with a "product" focus—that is to say, the choices they make about their assignments (frequency; genre; difficulty; grading scheme; etc.) are oriented ...

Travis Grandy is a PhD student in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Find him on Twitter @travisgrandy or at his website. I work with a lot of instructors who use ...

Threshold concepts are the core knowledge and disciplinary capabilities that students must successfully transition through to make progress in their majors. The threshold concepts (TC) framework is ...

In education–and particularly with my graduate students in higher education–students occasionally focus on the individual points of an assignment rubric instead of stepping back and looking ...

In higher education, particularly with my graduate students, students occasionally focus on the individual points of an assignment rubric instead of stepping back and looking holistically at the ...

Experts tend to complete writing tasks more quickly than novices by combining or skipping steps due to years of practice and mastery. Our students often come to us as novices who are still learning ...

It is good teaching practice to be clear and transparent about the purpose, task, and criteria for assignments and learning activities. This includes communicating with students about what is and is ...