Assignments: difficult and tedious or difficult and engaging

I often teach a capstone course that typically requires students to write a research proposal in the style of my discipline (APA). This, of course, is a perfectly reasonable assignment. As a scholar, I have written dozens of research proposals (and reports) in this complicated style. So requiring our students to write these papers is justified.*

Not only that, but writing a research proposal requires several types of critical thinking and information literacy that we often say are among the goals for our major. For example, research proposals typically have some minimum number of citations, and this requires that students find, read, and evaluate information. The style of argument in the introduction section of a research proposal requires careful synthesis of the previous research. Creating a hypothesis based on that research requires creativity. The methods section also requires creativity, as well as knowledge of the scientific aspects of our discipline. The discussion section requires students to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their proposal, and to put their ideas into a larger context. So for one assignment, the research proposal offers a lot of bang for the buck.

It’s also an assignment that I know my students dread. I know this because they tell me so, and because the papers they produce are often so unsatisfying. To be clear, students in my capstone course have been meticulously taught how to write each and every section of a research proposal before they get to my class. In fact they are taught to write the various sections across three different courses. So by the time they get to my class they have already written several drafts of each section of the proposal. This is not a new task for them.

And I also leave the topic up to them, within the overall topic of the course (I’ve taught the course about three different topics over the years, including prejudice, evolutionary psychology, and empathy). So they should be interested in, if not excited by, the topic of their proposals.

But at some point I just got so frustrated by the poor quality of many of the proposals that I had to make a drastic change. I had exhausted all the ideas I could come up with to make them better, like having them turn in shorter milestone assignments along the way (topics, annotated bibliographies, outlines, rough drafts, etc.). They didn’t help. I required students to visit the writing studio on campus. No help.

At the same time I teach another course where I have an assignment that I intentionally describe in the vaguest terms possible. I simply tell them that they can do anything they want as long as it’s about the topic of the course and has a paper that goes with it that explains what they did and why, and how it relates to the class. I’ve gotten poems, short stories, screenplays, songs (submitted with their recording of it), sculptures, paintings, dramatic performances, analyses of current events, movies, comic books, and videogames. Not all of them are spectacular, but many are, and many clearly required impressive amounts of work and insight, and yes, critical thinking. They key here was that I knew that students at my institution had the ability to produce inspiring products if the assignment was right. So my challenge was to discern what made that class’s assignment produce such outstanding work, and how I could apply that to my capstone course while retaining the rigor and critical thinking that the research proposal required.

I started by thinking about the goals I had for the research proposal assignment. These included the critical thinking and information literacy that I described above, plus a deep dive into a research literature. The economy of the proposal is alluring (all those goals in one assignment!), but I realized that I was ending up with many smaller assignments leading up to the final draft of the big assignment. So what if I could accomplish those same goals in the same number of assignments, but disconnect them so that each might stand on their own? If I could create, say, 7 assignments that each accomplished one of the goals that the proposal accomplished, then I would be requiring the same amount of work and achieving the same goals. So what’s the benefit of the new assignments? I thought I could create individual assignments that would engage the students like the assignment in my other class while retaining the intellectual goals as the proposal.

This blog is already too long for most readers to get even this far, so I won’t bore you, dear reader, with the details of the 7 assignments. But here are the titles:

Analyze a friend’s empathic abilities

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Wikipedia

Design an empathy-increasing procedure/game/task/intervention

Pay It Forward

Twitter

Reflect on this class, ideas, empathy in your life

I could go through each of them and talk about how they require this or that type of critical thinking. But suffice (here) to say that I think I’ve covered most if not all of the ones that a research proposal requires. They also stretch my students in new areas for them (twitter) and require reflection and foresight, which research on metacognition tells us is important and infrequently required. In addition, students report that they enjoy these assignments, and that some of them (especially the Pay It Forward paper) will stay with them after the class is over. That is a rare reaction to writing a research proposal. Not unheard of, but rare.

I guess my overall point here is that we have choices when we create assignments, and among those choices is between difficult and tedious assignments, and difficult and engaging assignments. I am all for hard work, and research in metacognition also points out that hard work has its own benefits. But I’ve encountered something in my vague-assignment class and my revised capstone class that I very rarely encountered in the research proposals: students doing more work than is really required. I often felt like I was in some twisted arms race between me and my students: how could I get them to work the most, and how could they work the least. But by changing the assignments into ones they found engaging that turned into a more collaborative arrangement where I tried to get them to work hard on an interesting problem, and they tried to do the best they could.

So they do all the critical thinking I want them to, they work as hard (or harder) as I want, and they write things they tell me they will remember after the course is over. And let me tell you another thing: reading those papers is much more rewarding for me than the paltry and barely-sufficient milestone assignments of the research proposal, much less the embarrassing research proposals themselves. Seems like a win-win.

So think about the assignments you most dread getting to grade. If you dread reading them it’s likely the students dreaded writing them. Do yourself – and more importantly, your students – a favor: think about the goals for that assignment and consider if there is another way to accomplish those goals that would engage the students more. You might never go back to the old assignment.

Here’s a comment from one of my capstone students:

"My favorite idea that we did in this class, by far, has to be the two different proposal papers.  I really enjoyed getting a chance to put myself into my work.  Like I said before, all my other classes involved article summaries or critiques.  Once you learn how to do them, and do them correctly, it becomes boring and doesn’t take any fore thought.  Whereas, in this class, I got to exercise my brain and put myself into psychology.  It really makes a difference in understanding the material, because normally studying psychology, I feel like information is just thrown at me, however, this class made me feel like I was actually a part of the psychology community.  My opinion, my voice had a say and was actually heard, thank you for that.

Another favorite idea of mine from this class is that there wasn’t any exams.  This really took the pressure off of studying and instead, I didn’t study, I learned.  I have never been able to take test or exams well; it seems that no matter how much I study or actually understand the information and able to talk about it, I can never reflect this knowledge through a test.  This is just another reason I loved the creative papers so much because I was able to show that I did know the information, clarifying my understanding and thoughts."

*Justified especially if we are preparing students for graduate school, where they will write many more research proposals. If they are not going to graduate school, the research proposal is less justified as preparation for their work after graduation. And most of my students are not going to grad school.