Supplemental Resources: Supporting Student Learning

Designing Effective Assessments

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Communicating Assignment Goals & Expectations

The TILT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching) Framework

The TILT framework is an excellent tool for designing clear and student-centered assignments. In a nutshell, the framework provides ways for instructors to make sure they have communicated a clear purpose, task, and performance criteria for their students, something that can tap into student motivation, clarify expectations, and increase student self-efficacy. The creators are also engaged in a longer-term research study to identify the framework’s effectiveness.

A good place to start would be to visit the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Assignment Design Examples and Resources page. This includes a smorgasbord of literature about how and why the framework was designed. It also includes a series of example assignments at stages before and after faculty have implemented the framework. 

  • A forewarning for those who dislike auto-playing website audio: the site has a message from the TILT project’s PI that plays when you click the link.

Key documents:

Designing Effective Writing Assignments

The UW-Madison Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Sourcebook

The UW-Madison Writing Center’s WAC Faculty Sourcebook includes guidance for faculty and a series of creative, thoughtfully-designed assignments composed by faculty at UW-Madison. It’s an excellent place to go for guidance and examples.

Additional Resources

 

Developing Assessment Criteria

 

License

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MTLE Resources Copyright © by Christian Castro; Naomi Salmon; and Madison Teaching and Learning Excellence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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