Section 1: What's In This Section?

Overview

The sample assignments in this section go beyond the traditional mid-term or end-of-term paper. They are authentic and retain the focus on writing and communicating well. Effective assignment design improves the quality of the learning and provides evidence for assessing student learning.

Assignments can be identified as "high stakes" or "low stakes" depending on the learning outcomes and what students are expected to deliver. A good technique for designing large or "high stakes" assignments is to break the assignment down into one or more "low stakes" assignments. This creates a more robust learning experience for students as they get early formative feedback on how they are doing with opportunities for improvement. A low stakes assignment might be an outline, an early draft of a paper, a proposal, an annotated bibliography, or an abstract.

This section includes samples of high and low stakes assignments.  While the assignment descriptions and rubric samples are very different, they all include important elements for effective assignment design.