[This is a guest post by Eric Hansen, a part-time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the College of Media and the iSchool at Syracuse University. He started the websites shiftlearning.com as a showcase of next-generation LMS technique, and tenprofs.com (@tenprofs) to rally gen-y/x professors in building an Information-Age successor to the death-by-PowerPoint model of higher education. Eric can be emailed, tweeted, poked, Googled and linkedIn.]
If you’re looking for a quick, road-tested tip, here it is: integrate checklists into your communication of assignment requirements and for improving the submission process. I recommend the Google Docs “New Form” tool, Wufoo.com, or formspring.com. What follows is a quick case study and how-to.
In honor of the 2011 GRE giving the axe to its infamous analogy questions, how about one more for the road?:
Surgeon : Malpractice :: Professor : [?]
Here’s my answer (and please respond with yours in the comments): Poor communication of expectations and requirements for assigned work.
The surgery will have been a success if professors reduce and eliminate student frustration during office hours; remove the phrase “that wasn’t fair” from their vocabulary; and, improve students’ end-user experience.
But the patient should live as well, so we look to Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and ProfHacker’s own Nels Highberg who primed the pump on leveraging lists for better performance.
Checklists? Check.
After absorbing the ideas in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, I realized that a simple checklist was a missing feature of the bedrock assignments in my class. If the assignment instructions were a sort of flight plan, checklists would be my Air Traffic Control.
After all, what is an assignment, but a form of checklist? So I dipped my toe in the water: here’s an example submission checklist (scroll up to see the full assignment) which is a simple Google Docs form embedded in the assignment page.
But was it successful enough to dip the other tow in and use checklists for both requirements and submission?
“We were able to save him, but I’m afraid his banjo days are over.”
The surgery was a success and the patient lived. Well, I did lose a limb on occasion.
- Pros: Several students told me that it was a major improvement in the assignment process—it made the necessary act of jumping through hoops easier. Students responded that it added to their confidence when submitting work.
- Cons: It didn’t always clear up confusion, or prompt students to come to me at an opportune time to help them (e.g., before a deadline).
So I need to make some adjustments both to implementation and my expectations for this approach. What’s next? Like any good experiment, I was left with more questions than answers.
It takes two
Two types of checklists are outlined in the book: do-confirm (e.g., preflight), and read-do (e.g., a recipe). The submission checklist is the former, and the assignment requirement list is the latter. This means that the next opportunity is in creating a better read-do checklist (assignment).
Although I’ve put significant effort into building a better assignment “sheet” for the new media literate students filling up classrooms, it’s still a close cousin to a crappy read-do checklist. It does not ascertain from the student:
- do they know what the assignment deliverables and requirements are?
- do they have the skills necessary? (If no, it must link to on-demand micro-lectures, like Khan Academy.)
- are they comfortable in taking the first steps?
- do they need individual, group, or on-demand learning attention for this assignment?
- is this assignment redundant with something they’ve already done personally, professionally, or for another class? (If so, an alternate assign should be a click away.)
- and so on…
Don’t chase the paper, chase the dream
Despite many small and fascinating tweaks to this idea, the bigger picture is about what an assignment represents in an evolved learning experience, “The Dream” I refer to above.
But that’s for a future blog post on how to effectively incentivize work [YouTube] beyond traditional carrots and sticks.
Are you using checklists or other new ways of communicating expectations and avoiding confusion in class? Are there other, better uses for checklists in educational delivery? Let’s discuss in the comments, or tweet me.
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12 Responses to Checklists: Giving Assignments a Facelift
jacobi1804 - September 21, 2010 at 11:09 am
So far I haven’t used checklists in class, but it has helped a lot with getting TAs and graders to follow procedure.
csdanforth - September 21, 2010 at 11:47 am
Fantastic post and smart ideas I’ll plan to try immediately. Thanks, Eric!
derekbruff - September 21, 2010 at 1:50 pm
I find that students are all too eager to follow recipes when tackling assignments. I’d rather they take more ownership of their work, so I’m skeptical of the “read-do” approach to clarifying expectations. (I’ll agree with you, however, that clarifying expectations is critical!)Instead of a checklist, I share with my students an analytic rubric, one that features multiple categories (e.g. scope of project, appropriateness of evidence, clarity of arguments) and descriptions of levels of quality in each of those categories. For example, under clarity of arguments, “Acceptable” might read “The student presents some reasonable evidence for his/her answer along with some other weak and/or appropriate evidence” while “Excellent” might read “The evidence the student presents for his/her answer is appropriate, supports his/her argument, and is notably varied and/or creative.” Scroll to pages 5-7 of this assignment description from a recent course for an example.I find this rubric does a good job of clarifying my expectations for students without giving them the message that all they need to do is follow some recipe. Plus, it makes grading their work very straight forward!
ethansen - September 21, 2010 at 5:41 pm
@csdanforth thanks! Please let me know how it goes, or if I can be of any help@derekbruff Balancing what to prescribe and what to place in their hands is a constant challenge. It bears noting that read-do really shines for skills components — labs, and objective components of larger assignments (document formatting, written length, etc.).Rubrics are a tried-and-true tool and are in some ways an extension of the checklist — a sort of checklist matrix.I’m personally not a fan of them because I think that for as thoughtful and explicit the various scales of the matrix, they don’t quite get the job done in terms of putting students’ minds at ease that they can’t be dinged or lose points for something.The primary idea here is let’s strip out everything that is binary or essentially pass/fail about an assignment, and put it on a checklist. A rubric isn’t the right tool for this specific job, but I can see the best of both being combined for a great effect.For example, you could highlight certain passages in submitted work and create a sort of link, or tag associated with a rubric entry. This would make the grades/evaluation more valuable to the student because the relationship between the submission and the rubric is made more concrete.Thank you for your thoughts!
hoytleno - September 22, 2010 at 9:09 am
“I’m personally not a fan of [rubrics] because … they don’t quite get the job done in terms of putting students’ minds at ease that they can’t be dinged or lose points for something.”I think that’s the point: for some kinds of assignments you want to put the students’ minds at ease, for some you don’t–you want them to try really, really hard, and push themselves to the limit of their own abilities. That’s difficult to accomplish but a rubric is a good way of laying it out!
lisacs - September 22, 2010 at 10:37 am
Thanks Eric!Lisa Cheney-Steen
ethansen - September 22, 2010 at 11:34 am
@hoytlenoTo sum up, I think the checklist is a tool that improves the students’ experience with assigned work, and the rubric is more useful for the teacher and grader. But here’s a more detailed explanation.We absolutely agree that the point is getting students to put their total effort and creative energy into assignments.My experience has demonstrated to me that making checklists available and fostering creativity are not mutually exclusive.For example, an assignment to create a podcast had lots of pass/fail options (e.g., when I clicked on the subscribe link, did it start downloading automatically), but only after making all of those A to B elements perfectly clear with a checklist, where the students free to focus more energy toward the creative content of the podcast.Even the best rubrics I’ve seen only seem to codify that which students already know: a top grade must not have any mechanical errors, have sufficiently supported arguments, etc.I would like to see all of the top grade requirements from a rubric be made into a checklist – set that as the standard and then focus the students’ energy on the creative elements.
matt_l - September 22, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I think this is interesting, but the examples make this seem more applicable to vocational or ‘how to’ types of learning, like a class on making podcasts, games, or widgets. I understand how this would be useful in an IT class or something. Its not clear from the post or comments how this checklist approach would help with an English essay or a History Research Paper. Professors in these disciplines need help with writing better instructions. Or at least thats what my wife, the technical documentation writer, says about my assignment sheets :)
scades - September 22, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Perhaps I’m missing something. Looks to me that every instruction on the check-list is in the assignment. My goal in teaching–aside from the subject-matter itself–is to help students learn to read carefully and take initiative. I do use grading rubrics, one element of which might be, “Completed all elements of the assignment.”I don’t want to send them out into the world believing that they will be rewarded simply for passively waiting for instructions.
ethansen - September 22, 2010 at 3:59 pm
@matt_l you’re 100% right that these came in handy for the skills component of my course, but each lab had a creative element too (engaging audio for podcasts, visually rich visuals for an online video lab, etc.).It’s not an either or — vocation or creative/scholarly.My point is really that boiling down all of the objective (it worked or it didn’t) requirements of any assignment into a checklist frees up students to focus on the perspiration and inspiration of an assignment more effectively.I can’t say that I’ve had the opportunity to apply this approach with a standard writing assignment, but every assignment has objective requirements (e.g., proper mechanics, spelling, formatting, number/quality of citations) and a checklist is a great add-on for making those clear to students.I think your wife has a point! But it starts with shaking up the traditional tool in use first.
ethansen - September 22, 2010 at 4:07 pm
@scades I share your concern: what is the best balance of hand-holding and gentle-shoving?These checklists come from the real world — Dr. Gawande cites medical, construction, aeronautics, and several other real-world uses of checklists.Ah, but what about the careful reading skills? You noticed that the checklist information was already in the assignment under the requirements section. Two points: 1. this is really an interface issue because you want the information to live in one place, but the checklist was integrated into the process mid-semester; 2. reshuffling the typical information in an assignment sheet and rubric doesn’t seem to have the potential to rob students of these skills.I’d rather they apply their critical thinking energy to the research and work instead of deciphering an assignment/rubric. There will never be a shortage of poorly written instructions, but the tools for improving our assignment communication (embeddable checklists, youtube videos, wikis, etc.) are now too widely available to not apply them to this exercise.Thank you for considering my points. I think we very much want the same thing. Let me know if you are willing to dip a tow in the water as well.
derekbruff - September 26, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Ethan writes, “My point is really that boiling down all of the objective (it worked or it didn’t) requirements of any assignment into a checklist frees up students to focus on the perspiration and inspiration of an assignment more effectively.”I have a clearer idea of what you’re saying now, that the objective parts of an assignment might be more clearly communicated with a checklist. My worry is that some students would do everything on the checklist and then say, “Ok, I’m done. Where’s my A?”If the objective stuff is on the checklist, how would you (a) incorporate the subjective stuff in your grading and (b) communicate your expectations for the subjective stuff to the students? (At least, for those assignments that had both objective and subjective components.)