Low-Stakes Assignments

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Purpose

Infusing low-stakes assignments into your course may be a significant change for your students! These assignments assess the student's knowledge level or understanding of course content without a heavy load of course points attached. The purpose is to give students an indication of their progress and provide a benchmark to measure what they still need to accomplish before the high-stakes assessment at the end of the unit.

Key Component

A large part of this low-stakes approach is feedback. This feedback must be timely and constructive. Starting these low-stakes assignments and effective feedback early in the semester will set the expectations and routines for your students. You are opening lines of communication with students and allowing them to feel comfortable discussing the muddy points in class for them or to reach out for assistance. Don't forget - that assistance can come from their peers and senior program students, not just you! This method of feedback and communication will allow students to access resources and help, mitigating issues further along in the course.

why?

Let's face it. We humans don't like to feel dumb. We enjoy challenges but want to feel like we are accomplishing milestones, making progress, and not feeling like we're falling behind or seen as a fool in front of our peers. This human tendency can be amplified in the classroom due to the close proximity of peers and the finances at stake behind every college course. Let's focus on encouraging and promoting our learners, which will in turn help them grow in their education. Students who feel confident in their ability to learn will be more engaged in the classroom and more likely to seek help when needed.

Online and in-person

All classes can benefit from this low-stake assignment approach, especially the online courses where nonverbal communication is missing, learning may be asynchronous, and students may be more reluctant to ask for help.

Implementation ideas:

Quizzes

These are great for low-stakes assessments since LMS quizzes are graded automatically, and students are given feedback on their learning. You can also set up students' views so they can see class averages and the most highly missed questions to gauge their progress further.

Keep in mind that this feedback is immediate and great, but missing the personal touch from the professor. I don't recommend relying on T/F or Multiple Choice quizzes as your sole or main source of feedback for students. Consider adding a deeper short answer question at the end of the quiz. The student can see their scores on the questions, but it still leaves room for additional instructor feedback.

Weekly quiz
Polling during class lectures
Smaller quizzes corrected and used collectively as study guide for high-stake semester exam
Peer quizzing
"Ticket" question when entering or leaving class

Discussions

Discussions (not only discussion board posts online) allow students to interact with their peers and instructor in a non-time-sensitive manner. If students are given time to form their responses and write or type them before interacting with the course, you build their confidence and comfort with sharing.

I love when professors will take the time in the classroom or online to truly get involved in discussions with students to infuse ethical questions, current events, different aspects or simply engage with students on the same level. What a great way to give feedback to students in a low-stakes way!

Discussion boards online
In-class round table
In-class smaller group chats
1:1 brief chat with professor
Video thread discussion
Synchronous document annotations
Class discussions with a guest
Journaling
Class consensus on the "Muddiest" point in the unit so far & discuss how to correct/clarify

High-stakes prep

Adding prep assignments that lead up to a high-stakes project, presentation, or another assessment allows several opportunities to ensure students are on the right track!

As a student, I felt much more confident writing my big term paper when I had feedback on an annotated bibliography or outline first. There's no reason to leave students in this state of unknown cluelessness about their prep for their high-stakes assignments. This method is especially helpful for freshmen who are new to higher education and for seniors in graduate and post-graduate level degrees approaching thesis and dissertation mountains.

Project proposal
Outline/Draft
Draft of specific section/topic within the larger project
Annotated bibliography
Abstract
Peer Reviews

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