Assignment Design

• Designing Quality Multiple Choice Questions (Poorvu Center for Teaching & Learning, Yale University) – This brief article reviews ways to ensure multiple choice questions are accurate and reliable measures of student achievement.  

• Designing Better Quizzes (Faculty Focus) – This comprehensive report covers a myriad of quiz-related topics: quizzes to promote discussion, motivate learning, pros and cons of ungraded quizzes, assessment in a flipped classroom, and more. 

• Keys to Designing Effective Writing & Research Assignments (Faculty Focus, The Teaching Professor) – This collection of articles covers writing-related topics such as writing papers in chunks, designing assignments to minimize cyber cheating, and giving low-stakes writing to facilitate learning. 

• Make a Better Writing Assignment by Design - (by Travis Grandy, Inside Higher Ed) – Help students become better writers by scaffolding writing assignments, and having clear, detailed expectations.  

• What Are We Doing and Why? Transparent Assignment Design Benefits Students and Faculty Alike -  (by Kasey Christopher, The Flourishing Academic) – From the perspective of a biologist, Christopher describes her experience discovering how increasing the clarity of her assignments resulted in fewer student questions and improved student work. 

• Designing Effective Online Assignments (by Todd Gilman, Chronicle of Higher Education) – Gilman discusses how enabling students to learn independently is key to a successful online course.  

• Inclusive Assessment: Equal or Equitable? (by Donna M. Qualters, Teaching@Tufts) – A brief article discussing approaches to ensuring assessments are equitable and student-centered.

• MIT Open Courseware (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) MIT offers an extensive listing of free online course materials, including assignments by discipline/course.