Much like a college course, paper wasp nests are carefully constructed with many interconnected layers designed towards specific goals
(photo from mindenpictures.com)
In some college courses that I've taken or observed, it seems that most assignments are there just to create grades with little consideration for the value they actually provide in furthering student learning. I am especially frustrated by assignments where students receive feedback but have no avenue to respond and make improvements to their work -or worse yet, the paper is returned with a grade and no or little feedback to inform the student how they could have been more successful. Purposeful teaching needs to be approached from a growth mindset, and the structure of our courses should provide ample opportunity for mistakes and revisiting of material and concepts that were not grasped.
When I took over teaching the Insects and Society Lab in my Entomology Department, two of the precious lab slots were taken up with a midterm and final exam. Having TA'ed the course before in its original form, I did not think these exams led to students learning more, or in greater depth- instead students were more preoccupied with making sure they had written down terms that might be on the test than with understanding their relevance to larger concepts in the course, and often forgot the stored library of terms shortly after the test. I realized that if I could find a better way to motivate my students to engage with our lab activities than the fear of a test, I would have two more lab sessions (13% more time) available for learning. My approach was my first dip in the waters of mastery based learning (which I will talk more about in another post). Rather than relying on students' fear that something from that week's lab activity might be on a test to encourage participation and engagement, I developed a much more interactive workbook for each lab that guided students through the information and helped them connect concepts. I see these lab activities as in class studying rather than material for assessment. Therefore, they serve as participation points that are earned if the student displays satisfactory mastery of the learning objectives for the lab. My goal with these assignments is for every student to get full credit, regardless of how many times I need to provide some reteaching and/or resubmission to individual students on concepts that were not grasped in the first round.
The first step in developing a purposeful assignment is to clearly define the learning goals. What are the most important concepts you want students to walk away understanding, and what skills should they be developing? I focus on understanding over memorization. I like to ask myself "What do I want students to remember from this class a year from now, or 5 years from now?" I consider what information they might use in their daily lives, thinking about this from the perspective of many different student backgrounds and career aspirations. Then, I try to find ways to connect the concepts or skills to a variety of student values. In entomology, this might be giving students a better understanding of how ecosystems function and the role insects play, how to best protect yourself from arthropod-vectored pathogens, or more basic science skills such as how to read a scientific paper or identify reliable sources of scientific information.
I create my assignments to teach students a variety of ways to study and learn. Pedagogy literature has shown us that we are more likely to learn something the more we use all our senses to engage with the information. For this reason, I teach my students to study insect anatomy and diversity through drawing. Drawing is one of the best mnemonic devices, and I find that it helps students notice things they didn't by just looking at a specimen or diagram. As a plus, many students really enjoy getting to do something creative and relaxing. If we constantly ask ourselves about the purpose of a question, task, or assignment, we can develop carefully crafted tools that promote learning rather than simply assess. Such tools will also be more reliable markers of student progress than assessments that are developed without much thought into the skills or knowledge they are meant to measure.