What do you want your students to be able to do when they leave your class?

When you are redesigning your assessments and using assignments as part of informing your instruction, identify your desired results and determine what kinds of evidence you'd like to capture. This is called backwards design. What do you want your students to be able to do when they leave your class? These are your final assessments at the end of the quarter. What does the assessment look like 2 weeks before that? Four weeks before? These can be 3 or 4 purposeful assignments that you're creating that students have the opportunity to demonstrate their learning. Your students' results on your assessments during these times are your formative assessments.

Before you start clicking away, use this mindful checklist to create purposeful and meaningful assignment:

State the purpose of the WHY in the beginning of the assignment, and how it relates to their workplace or future careers, potential future college classes or communities. Why are your students doing this assignment? How does this relate to their lives?
State the skills that they will demonstrate and how it relates to the student learning outcomes. Which skills or concepts do you want your students to demonstrate? How does this assignment align with your course student learning outcomes?
If possible, provide students multiple ways to demonstrate learning. How do you want your students to demonstrate this? Will you give them choices on how to demonstrate this in multiple ways? Is this a writing assignment, a PowerPoint with voice over, a website your student created, a mind map, a video of a skit?
Include a detail of instructions on how to complete the assignment. Are you writing clear instructions that are understandable by your students? Perhaps a numbered list?
Provide an example (or multiple examples) of what you expect them to do. Do you have an example of what you want your students to do? Add this.
Be transparent with how you will grade your student's work. How are you going to assess the assignment? Using rubrics? If yes, what does your rubric look like? Do the criteria capture what the student should be demonstrating? Are the ratings clear to the student about how they are being measured?
Provide substantive feedback after student submit assignments. Does your feedback point out the knowledge or skills a student has, or should have, acquired previously? How they should utilize the feedback to gain further knowledge of the topic? Does it point out resources to further add to student knowledge? How will you communicate to your students about when you will be giving feedback? Right after? Two days later?

References

Bowen, Ryan S., (2017). Understanding by Design. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [December 13, 2018] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/understanding-by-design/.