Choosing Assignment Types

First Steps

Determining the most effective assignment type to measure student learning is one of the most important steps in designing your course. First, you will need to decide:

  • what do students need to know? what knowledge or skills do they need to demonstrate an understanding of? in other words, what should the assessment measure?
  • at what level should the students be? at the current point in the quarter, should students have a familiarity with the material, or should they have mastered it?

Consider the following questions in your pre-assessment building planning:

  • Have they experienced “socialization” in the culture of your discipline (Flaxman, 2005)? Are they familiar with any conventions you might want them to know? In other words, do they know the “language” of your discipline, generally accepted style guidelines, or research protocols?
  • Do they know how to conduct research?  Do they know the proper style format, documentation style, acceptable resources, etc.? Do they know how to use the library (Fitzpatrick, 1989) or evaluate resources?
  • What kinds of writing or work have they previously engaged in?  For instance, have they completed long, formal writing assignments or research projects before? Have they ever engaged in analysis, reflection, or argumentation? Have they completed group assignments before?  Do they know how to write a literature review or scientific report?

From "How Do I Create Meaningful and Effective Assignments?" Links to an external site. from Texas Tech's Teaching, Learning and Professional Development Center

Traditional Assignment Choices

Once you have established what you want to measure, you can determine the best format for the measurement instrument. Not all assignments are the same; just because you have an existing assignment (or inherited one from a previous faculty member or used one provided with publisher materials) doesn't mean that it measures what you hope to measure. Some assignment types measure unintended skills, and others are simply not designed for specific skills. 

Review the following chart for the advantages and disadvantages of the most common assessment types:

Assessment Type Advantages Disadvantages

Essay
  • many opportunities for students to show knowledge
  • ability to test higher-level thinking
  • essay comments able to effect future learning
  • guessing is not an option
  • large amount of time to assess
  • potential for scoring bias
  • open topics can overwhelm students
  • narrow essay focus may discourage assessing breadth of knowledge

Short Answer/Completion
  • short grading time required 
  • guessing is less possible than Multiple Choice
  • many topics can be assessed/covered
  • guessing is difficult
  • more difficult to assess higher-level thinking
  • longer prep time for effective exam questions
  • encourages surface-level memorization

Multiple Choice, T/F, Matching

 
  • short grading time
  • many topics can be assessed in one exam
  • objective scoring
  • can be used for lower- and higher-level thinking (with careful question construction)
  • prep time is longer
  • guessing possible
  • more difficult to assess higher-level thinking
  • encourages surface-level memorization

Portfolios

 
  • demonstrates a progression of learning 
  • opportunities available for student reflection
  • work may have future/job uses 
  • grading time is longer
  • potential for scoring bias

Demonstration/ Presentations/ Simulations

 
  • ability to test higher-level & creative thinking
  • student prep and support required
  • grading time is short
  • ability to test more direct application of required skills
  • provides opportunities for non-traditional student skills
  • longer class time required for individual demos
  • potential interpersonal issues with groups
  • unlimited options can overwhelm students

Sources Used:

 

Traditional Assignment Examples

For an extensive list of assignments that meet a variety of learning objectives, see DePaul's Teaching Commons's "Aligning Assignments with Learning Goals." Links to an external site.  A sample of the information follows:

List of Assignments that can help assess the learning goal: "Develop Professional Skills"

 

If you are looking for assessments that don't fall into the "traditional" category, there are many options available.

Traditional vs. Non-Traditional Approaches

As faculty are the authority about learning assessments in the classroom, there is no requirement to assess students in any particular way. Often, faculty fall into the trap of using the same kinds of assessments that others in their fields or departments use, or the same kinds that they experienced themselves in their own training and education. Of course, there are good reasons to limit your assessment types to traditional paper and pencil exams when familiarity with those forms is important to their future success. If students will face a high-stakes exam for professional certification, then provide opportunities to practice skills in the same format. But, when the learning targets are broad enough to be assessed through any variety of assessment types, you can measure learning through creative approaches.

Although creativity and fun are worthy objects, using non-traditional assessments are not only about fun. Creative approaches can be more engaging for students - new and innovative always increases the imagination, and any way to engage student attention increases the likelihood of learning. Additionally, using non-traditional assessments also allows for students to use and display different - sometimes non-academic - skills. Providing opportunities for students to showcase talents in the arts, music, games, and even pop culture increases student confidence and their connection to their courses. In particular, first-generation students have the chance to see connections between their life experiences and academic success. Also, students who have struggled with more traditional classroom exams and essays can recognize that authentic learning and superficial assessments are two separate things. 

 

A Note about Assessing Alternate/Non-Traditional Approaches

If you are using a creative approach to assessing student learning, make certain that your grading approach keeps in mind the learning target. It would be unfair to assess someone's artistic abilities in an assignment that focused on understanding key historical or accounting information, especially in a class that did nothing to support artistic abilities. So it is really important to address student fears that a lack of creative skills will negatively affect their grades. Communicate transparently the grading expectations: use rubrics that focus on key learning outcomes, provide examples of previous student work if possible, and/or explain to students the real grading emphasis - what matters and what does not. 

For more information on grading approaches, see the Ungrading, TILT and Rubrics modules.

 

Some Non-Traditional Assignment Examples

The following information and examples were published in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Teaching" blog, in the article by Beth Mercutrie titled "Ditch The Tests"  Links to an external site.on August 27, 2020.

"Ditch the Tests"

"High-stakes tests are stressful enough. Add a pandemic and online-proctoring challenges to the mix, and they become even less appealing. What can faculty members do instead?

"A couple of weeks ago, I asked Links to an external site. faculty members to share creative assessment strategies, particularly ones that could translate to an online classroom. I received several great responses. Here are a few:

  • Multimedia history projects: Inspired by her department’s flipped-course approach to teaching, and by L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences Links to an external site., Johanna Mellis, an assistant professor of world history at Ursinus College, has largely shifted to using creative, end-of-semester projects for her 100- and 200-level courses. In her class on global colonialism, for example, students did research on the history of colonialism, “which they then ‘remixed’ using a digital tool of their own choosing, to explain the history to a non-History audience,” she writes. (They were taught how to use digital tools like TimelineJS, StoryMaps, Fakebook, and Microsoft Sway.) Students in Mellis’s world-history survey course did a Storyboard That project, working in groups “to create a graphic history of an individual who experienced the Arab Spring as detailed in the NY Times piece 'Fractured Lands.'” This fall, Mellis is teaching a new survey course, online, on sports in world history. For students’ last assignment, she writes, “I am thinking of letting them do this final reflection in a format of their choosing (video, podcast, writing, a digital drawing tool, etc.),” though she is still working out the details.
  • Advocacy through art: Aimee Escalante, an adjunct lecturer in the College of Education at California State University-Monterey Bay, wrote in to describe an upper-division seminar that also fulfills a university writing requirement. Her students write a large research paper on an issue in education, along with recommendations on how to address it. A couple of years ago, she began asking them to create a piece of art to go along with it, designed to make their case. “I was very open-ended in how they could approach it,” she writes, “and students were graded on their reflection about the process rather than the art.” The students loved the assignment, she reports, finding it “relaxing and a welcome break from the hectic schedule at the end of the semester. I also believe the assignment is more culturally responsive and enables students to utilize some of their skills that they may not have been able to show in their papers. “I have loved reviewing their art, which has included songs, videos, paintings, editorial cartoons, comics, poems, sculptures, short stories, and photography. The students have asked to have a mini art show to share their pieces, and they enjoy discussing and reviewing their and their peers’ work. I believe this activity also helps build community. It is the highlight of my semester.”
  • Creative classics: Deborah Beck, an associate professor in the classics department at the University of Texas at Austin, completely redesigned the final exam for her spring "Intro to Classical Mythology" course after it moved online. She came up with a three-part, open-book test that students had two days to complete. First, they had to submit an academic analysis of around 300 words, in which they chose the subject. Second, they had to come up with a creative piece. Submissions included “makeup design for a performance of Euripides' Medea, movie posters, poetry, karaoke, collages, a spoof of an anthropology professor explaining why it doesn't make sense to evaluate ancient mythological stories using modern ethical standards, and a crossword puzzle, among other things,” she writes. The third part was either a 300-word essay or a short video “in which they explained how the other two things they submitted were the best ways to show what they had learned. “This was a huge success,” she writes. “The students enjoyed it, and they came up with some absolutely astonishing work; my TA and I enjoyed our final exam grading, probably a first for me; and although we graded these submissions based almost entirely on completion, it would be easy to design a rubric so that submissions could be graded, even for the creative assignment, where ‘grading’ can feel awkward.”

Two other clever assignments also stood out:

  • Monopoly: For more than a decade, Kerry Calnan, an associate professor of accounting and finance at Nichols College, has taught a course on the principles of accounting entirely through Monopoly. Students represent real-estate companies, and through five hourlong rounds of the board game they focus on accounting issues. (She notes that this also works with a virtual Monopoly app or with videoconferencing and game boards.) “We would need to show the bank if we were solvent and that we could meet basic ratios to prove we were a good loan,” Calnan writes. “After the round, we would close the books for the quarter. At the end of the four quarters, we closed out the books for the year and analyzed the business to report to an outside panel of bankers. Suddenly, all the students in my section understood how accounting works and the value it brings to a business. My colleagues thought I was a bit crazy, but my students loved it. They outperformed the traditional sections every year.”
  • Buzzfeed-type quiz: Jean A. Stuntz, a history professor at West Texas A&M University, taught an honors course called "Bada$$ Women in History." “For their end-of-semester class project, the students designed a Buzzfeed-type quiz where people could answer several questions and then be matched with a woman from history,” she writes. “They came up with the idea themselves, they did the research on the women, they divided their findings into personality bits they matched up with questions and answers, they created the quiz, they sent it out on various social-media platforms (we got several hundred responses), then they analyzed the results. It was extraordinary. They did all the work, from coming up with the idea to the final papers. I just sat back and watched the magic happen.”

Consider these and other non-traditional assessments that let students bring new skills to the classroom and still assess learning targets.