How One Professor Made Her Assignments More Relevant

Travis Dove for The Chronicle

Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This week:

• Beckie explains how one instructor used trial and error to change her approach to creating relevant assignments.
  
• Beth describes a new effort to help professors research teaching and learning.
  
• Steven highlights one faculty member’s tips for designing an effective pop-up course.
  
• We point you toward some recent Chronicle articles about teaching.
  

Not a ‘Pointless Exercise’

Tanya Martini worked hard to make assignments in her psychology courses relevant to students’ lives. Even so, her students sometimes wrote in their course evaluations that they found those assignments pointless.

It was a frustrating situation, but not an uncommon one. Plenty of professors get similar feedback, especially when they, like Martini, a professor of psychology at Brock University, in Ontario, teach courses that attract nonmajors looking to fulfill a graduation requirement.

Martini decided to do something about it. When students indicated that an assignment was pointless, she figured, they were thinking only about the content it covered, not the skills it would help them build.

So Martini began including a breakdown of those skills in her assignments’ instructions. Surely that would help.

She ran an experiment to find out, asking students to rate the relevance of assignments with and without a description of the associated skills. To Martini’s surprise and dismay, her addition didn’t make much of a difference. Telling students that an assignment would help them build a particular skill was apparently insufficient.

Why? Many students, Martini realized, thought of skills in a narrow, context-specific way. It wasn’t clear to them that the same skill that a psychology essay would build – written communication – would also help them tackle a history paper, or a business proposal. Higher education often assumes that students can figure out how the skills they learn in one context transfer to a different one. “I think now,” Martini said, “that it’s asking a lot of them.”

So Martini added more-specific language to her assignment instructions to help students think about how the skills they develop can transfer to other areas. “It’s partly about making it very explicit,” she said. “But it’s also partly about giving them concrete examples.”

She began by acknowledging that these connections might not be obvious to students – and that they might therefore question an assignment’s relationship to their goals.

Take, for example, an assignment for students in a second-year course in human learning, in which they create study materials for students in the introductory course. “You may think that this is a pointless exercise if you have no interest in being a teacher (and, more specifically, teaching PSYC 1F90),” she wrote in the instructions. But the assignment, she went on to explain, was about using design thinking, which “happens in any field where people have to ask themselves, on a regular basis, questions like, ‘How can we do this? How can we make this experience/process work? Could we be making this experience/process better for people? And if we could, what would ‘better’ look like?’”

The instructions for another assignment in the course describe how a skill it builds, knowledge translation, can be used in a variety of settings. “Whether you become a marketing manager or a cop or a counsellor or a physiotherapist,” she wrote, “you will often find yourself in a position of having to explain things to others (e.g., clients, parents and other family members) who haven’t had your level of training.”

Are these additions enough to move the needle on the way students view assignments? Martini hopes to know soon. One of her students plans to compare the relevance ratings students give to three versions of the assignment – one with no mention of skills, one describing skills, and one further communicating their application – as a senior thesis project. She hopes to have results next month.

Martini’s approach shares elements with a broad effort, called transparency in learning and teaching, that encourages professors to make the purpose of their assignments explicit to students.

Another way of helping students understand the skills a particular course helps develop is explaining it in the syllabus. You can read more about that in this newsletter by our colleague Goldie Blumenstyk. (The newsletter has since been renamed The Edge, and you can sign up to receive it here.)

Have your students ever questioned the utility of your assignments? What do you do to help them apply what they learn in your classroom to their lives beyond it? Tell me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com and your example may appear in a future newsletter.

**A message from The Chronicle: Reforming Gen Ed Issue Brief

A thorough, well-planned gen-ed program is essential to preparing today’s students for an increasingly complex world. Get this special report for key insights into what you need to know before rethinking your college’s core courses.**

Help for Professors Studying Their Teaching

As more faculty members become interested in conducting research on their teaching, they’re running into a common challenge: institutional review board approval. Securing approval, which is required for any academic research involving human subjects, can be a long and complicated process, and may deter some people from diving into their classroom data.

Now Carnegie Mellon and Duke Universities are offering up free tools and templates to make that process go faster. As part the Empirical Educator Project, which promotes evidence-based teaching practices through collaborative projects, the two institutions are sharing their templates, along with technical support, with other colleges. A professor could use the templates, for example, to make it easier to request consent to participate from students, and then track their responses.

Kimberly Manturuk, associate director of research, evaluation, and development at Duke Learning Innovation, says that their in-house process to streamline IRB approvals, called WALTer, has shrunk the time to secure approval to seven to 10 days, down from five to eight weeks.

“What we’ve seen is that faculty can conduct research as it happens on the ground,” she says. “They can respond to things happening in the classroom as they’re teaching.”

A German professor, for example, is looking at whether studying sociolinguistics in addition to language could help students become more sensitive to other cultures. A computer-science professor is looking at how well students do in assessing their own performance in class.

You can find the Duke and Carnegie Mellon tools at the website of e-Literate, the education-technology blog that runs the Empirical Educator Project.

Rice University has taken a different approach to streamlining human-subjects approval: creating an “umbrella protocol” that allows instructors to essentially join a study already in progress. Read Beckie’s story about that here.

Planning Your Pop-Ups

After reading last week’s newsletter on pop-up courses, Noah Coburn, a political anthropologist at Bennington College, had a few pointers for faculty members designing their own.

Coburn has taught two of Bennington’s pop-ups since the college started offering them about four years ago. His first came about after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated Nepal in 2015. Coburn and Nepali students worked together to offer a one-credit course on the disaster, just three weeks after it happened.

Coburn assigned a few basic readings, and in the class’s first meeting asked students around the room what they were most interested in learning. He and about 15 students designed a course almost in real time, as the aftermath unfolded.

The flip side of offering a course on such recent subject matter is that you have to sacrifice the sort of academic analysis that comes months, or years, after an event. Being “really transparent” about that uncertainty went a long way, Coburn said. “What I ended up doing was focusing on these topics from different disciplinary standpoints on different days,” he said. Students brought in their own texts to explore.

“Counterintuitively, while these courses are about emergent content, the focus becomes even more on skills,” Coburn said, especially the kinds of research and analytical skills scholars use when they’re the first to examine something.

During the Nepal course, for instance, he and his students noticed lots of news articles about the surprisingly strong youth response in the country’s disaster-relief efforts. So the class added scholarly articles on civil society and governance to make hypotheses about what drove the trend.

Student input is crucial, both in class and in selecting texts, he said. But it’s not hard to draw it out. “This is something that the students chose, which raises engagement in some interesting ways,” he said.

In a Twitter thread, Coburn laid out more of what he learned:

Interesting piece on ‘The Merits of the Very, Very Short Course in @Chronicle by @stetyjohn. I’ve taught two one-credit #popup courses @atBennington, which have been great experiences. https://t.co/3yIBdc8ykE

— Noah Coburn (@NoahSCoburn) February 15, 2019

You can’t teach a pop-up as just a portion of a full course, he said. “Feedback has to be faster,” he wrote. “Make assignments shorter and easier to assess, try some ideas like peer assessment and in class work.”

ICYMI, Chronicle Edition

• How can college prepare graduates “to wrestle with intractable problems and unending disruption”? James Madison University’s X-Labs offers an experimental approach that brings together project-based learning and open-ended research as students tackle issues as big as homelessness. Read more about it in Beth’s recent story.
  
• Colleges have more data about students than ever before. But that doesn’t mean that professors know what to make of all this information, or have time to wrestle with it. In another recent story, Beth explores how some professors are navigating these data to improve their teaching.
  
• Do liberal-leaning professors penalize students with conservative views? Steven explains what the research shows here.
  
• After Fort Lewis College shut down several language programs, professors got creative about saving Spanish. Steven has the story.
  
• An Augsburg University professor was suspended for an unspecified “range of issues raised by students” after repeating a racial epithet used in a text his class was reading. Our colleague Zipporah Osei presents expert insight on the question of using such terms in the classroom here.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or steve.johnson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive your own copy, you can sign up here.

— Beckie, Beth, and Steven

Love the Teaching newsletter? Recommend it to a friend. Want to learn more about The Chronicle’s coverage of teaching and learning? Read this. Have questions about the newsletter? Read this FAQ. Past editions are available here.