Death to shitty assignment prompts
[NOTE: This piece was first published as part of a column called “Design Eats the World” in The Daily of the University of Washington HERE.]
If you’re a university student, it’s likely you’ve witnessed a shitty assignment prompt at least once. Anecdotally, we are used to whining about tight deadlines and the lack of free time. However, as someone who has studied at the UW in three different schools across two degree levels, I’ve faced my share of really frustrating assignment prompts. It’s quite likely that bad assignment prompts are hurting Huskies’ learning experiences and grades.
Ambiguities in assignments are nothing new. Last quarter, I was faced with a prompt that caught me and my colleagues off guard. On a “career review” type assignment, we were asked to search for three different jobs and perform something called a SWOT analysis. Due to ambiguous phrasing, at least one student said she suffered because she did a separate analysis for each of the three jobs instead of one for the entire assignment.
Sentiments like these were reflected in a survey I conducted asking students about their experiences with assignment prompts over the past 12 months. The 72 responses were surprisingly representative of the actual composition of the UW.
For instance, students from the College of Arts and Sciences are 47.1 percent of the university and constituted 47.8 percent of the survey. The College of Engineering students are 17.7 percent of the total university and a somewhat similar 14.5 percent of the survey. Together, their responses paint a picture of assignment designs across the swath of different majors that are mostly of average quality and occasionally below average.
On a scale where “5” was “very good” and “1” was “very bad,” 16.7 percent of respondents rated the “general clarity” of their assignment requirements as below average, while 33.3 percent said the general clarity was “average” on the same scale. Only 50 percent of the students polled said that the clarity of assignment prompts was either good or very good.
A massive 79.2 percent of respondents said that they’ve had to contact fellow classmates or teaching assistants (TAs) for clarifications on assignments. Similar to my baffled colleague, just over 50 percent of respondents said that in the past 12 months, confusing or ambiguous writing prompts actively harmed their grade.
“Research shows that many students struggle at first when they are making the transition to writing in their majors,” said Misty Anne Winzenried, director of Odegaard Writing and Research Center, over email. “Really explicit, scaffolded prompts can help bridge this gap.”
In my master’s of science discipline, many of my colleagues from a sciences background are used to writing prompts that are specific about what they require. The page-long “career planning” prompt we got likely tripped us up because those assignments are a lot less scaffolded with fuzzy edges. Hell, I did an undergraduate English degree and my M.S. assignments confused me to no end.
Overly long prompts are certainly bad as an isolated instance, but they’ve been seen elsewhere as well.
“Students would be asked a series of multiple questions and then [would] be confused what their essays should accomplish, which questions their essays should answer, [and] how they could incorporate all of the questions into one,” said a UW alumni and English major who tutored at the Odegaard Writing and Research Center. “Some students would bring in prompts pages and pages long.”
Smith also said overly long prompts could be accompanied by new terms and skills being thrown at students, and contradictory advice between TAs, teachers, and graders. As a designer who has to write short, snappy think pieces, I know that lengthy prompts with too many questions tend to exaggerate a lack of specificity in demands.
“There is research that suggests that students believe they learn the most when the writing expectations are made explicit,” said Sarah Peterson Pittock, associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking at Stanford University over email.
Pittock went on to reference a study of writing assignments that surveyed nearly 72,000 students and stated that clear writing assignments consist of: clear instructions describing what the instructor wanted you to do, the material they wanted you to learn, and the criteria they would use to grade your assignment.
Both Pittock and Smith have prescriptions for repairing this malaise.
“One thing professors and TAs can do is draft writing assignments ahead of time and peer review them within a teaching team,” Pittock said. “If there’s time, they can also seek student feedback.”
Smith focuses more on inter-departmental collaboration, especially for students used to a particular kind of writing.
“Asking for collaboration when building curriculum is essential here,” she said. “I’ve seen engineering students come in baffled at how to write reflective responses when these aren’t skills they’ve regularly practiced or that have been sufficiently covered in class.”
So how can we design better assignment prompts?
Pittock in a 2014 article said good assignment sheets should start by linking the writing task with specific learning goals and describing rhetorical aspects of the task (audience, purpose, genre). They should also make constraints like word count explicit, specify the format, and include grading criteria.
As a designer, I would also add some aspects of usability, an important aspect of any good design. Most notably, I would say that shorter assignment prompts with one or two requirements importantly improve the memorability of the tasks. I’ve often found myself switch tabs relentlessly looking for what the assignment actually needs among the sea of requirements.
Also, if long assignment prompts are unavoidable, they shouldn’t be structured like a first draft. A good assignment prompt is structured to make intuitive sense. If a new skill or term is introduced to the student, a short explanation would be extremely helpful.
I’m pretty convinced that more focus on the writing quality of assignment prompts would massively improve student outcomes. Pittock said that some staff at CalTech have started a new journal called Prompt, which publishes to help higher education professionals craft more effective writing assignments.
Maybe the tide of shitty assignment prompts is about to turn. Maybe it won’t ever turn. But we still have to ensure that they get better with each passing year.
Reach columnist Arunabh Satpathy at opinion@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @sarunabh
