Assignment Design / Assessment / Grading

Developing effective assignments and figuring out how to assess student learning meaningfully are at the core of what we do as instructors. Providing multiple forms of engagement and multiple strategies for assessment also helps make our classrooms more accessible to all students. The following resources are intended to help you with both of those critical aspects of teaching.

Designing effective assignments

• Assignment Design Checklist (developed by ACM colleagues)
• Transparent assignment design: “a systematic way to be transparent about the purpose, task, and criteria of assignments to promote students’ learning” (Willingham-McLain, 2017)
• The TILT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching) Project
• TILT Higher Ed Examples and Resources
• Sample assignments from the Geeky Pedagogy blog (including lots of references to “unessay” projects, which also leads to many references to “ungrading” – see below)
• The faculty section of the Macalester AI Literacy and Critical Thinking LibGuide offers assignment prompts for the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools
• Academics should rethink the way they assign homework: Quantity is not rigor (Davidson, 2020)
• National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment’s Assignment Library

Perspectives & Strategies for Providing Feedback, Grading, & Assessing Student Learning

• Providing effective feedback ([featured during SPAW 2023] Dickson & Housiaux, The Tang Institute at Andover)
• Three keys to better student writing – From students themselves (MAX Center)
• Meaningful, moral, manageable: The grading holy grail (Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence)
• Grading for equitable learning (a collection of perspectives and resources from the University of Rhode Island’s Office for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning)
• Grading for Growth
• Should we stop grading class participation? (Lang, 2021)
• Grades as a technology of surveillance: Normalization, control, and big data in the teaching of writing (Gavin P. Johnson, 2021)
• Association of College and University Educators (ACUE): Developing and using rubrics and checklists
• Low-stakes strategies for soliciting student feedback

Contract and Specifications Grading / Ungrading

• Ungrading: The Joys of Doing Everything Wrong (Masland, 2023)
• Keeping Receipts: Thoughts on Ungrading from a Black Woman Professor (McCloud, 2023)
• A Media Guide to Ungrading (Talbert, 2023)
• Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom (Inoue, 2019) 
• Sample grading contract (Inoue, adapted from Elbow)
• I have seen the glories of the grading contract… and I’m never going back (Warner, 2016)
• Specifications grading (Talbert, 2017)
• How to ungrade (Stommel, 2018)
• Ungrading: The significant learning benefits of getting rid of grades (Blum, 2017)
• My ungrading experiment (Dolson, 2022)
• There isn’t one “right way” to practice ungrading (Times Higher Education, 2022)