Get Your Students' Best Work

There’s a month left in the semester, and the final weeks are always packed with projects, papers, and exams. This time can be intense and stressful for both faculty and students, so it’s helpful to remind ourselves that the purpose of all of this final coursework is to give students a chance to demonstrate what they’ve learned.

Students produce their best work when our courses are well-aligned, meaning that there are clear goals; the projects, exams, and other major assessments are designed to collect evidence of students’ progress toward those goals; and the in- and out-of-class daily work offers opportunities for practice and feedback that will help students to work toward the goals over time.

If these major components of a course are out of alignment, it will be difficult for students to gauge their own progress, so they may learn less. They may be surprised by the exams, or complain that exams don’t reflect what they’ve learned. With a month left in the semester, there’s still time to check that our exam questions, or the specific tasks involved in completing the projects we assign, are aligned with our goals, so that they will measure what we intend for them to measure, and so that students can both learn more and better demonstrate their learning.

Lisa Turner de Vera, of FSU’s Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program and Department of Urban and Regional Planning, has been working on alignment in her ISS 4304 course:

I’ve been revising the final assignment, thinking in terms of my goals for students’ learning. I asked myself some questions: Why did I assign this in the first place? What are the skills my students really need to develop? Are all of the parts of the project important? Do all of these steps that I’m asking students to do help them accomplish the goals? Then, with my answers in mind, I’ve changed and streamlined some aspects of the project, so that it is more aligned with the intended benefits of the assignment.

In the future, I’m going to start creating assignments and tests by writing down what my goals are, and then I’ll think step by step through each part: Is this flowing from what I really want students to know and be able to do, and the way that I’m going to teach? Then, I can make sure the assignments are based on learning priorities, and that my teaching is, too, which will help me get a better outcome. And I can always revisit, and think more about my role in getting the kind of work I want to see.

If you’d also like to begin working on alignment by asking yourself some questions, here are a few to get you started:

What kind of thinking does each exam question ask students to do?
Have they practiced this kind of thinking before in the class?
Is the exam significantly more difficult than the practice students did leading up to it? (Contrary to what we often assume, the high stakes conditions of the exam should not be the first time students encounter complex questions or problems. Students need adequate opportunities to practice with the most challenging sorts of questions and thinking.)
Do the most important concepts—the ones you spent the most class time on—also have the most weight on the exam or in the project?
For a project, review the grading criteria or rubric:
- Does it reflect your priorities with regard to thinking, concepts, and content?
- Does it give too much weight to surface features?
- Did you spend class time on the aspects of the project that have the most weight on the rubric?
- Do students understand the rubric? Do they know how to use it to self-assess?

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse