How Can You Make Assignments Transparent?

This short video, based on research from the TILT Higher Education project, explains how transparent assignment design improves educational equity, student learning, and other student success outcomes.

This template can be used as a guide for developing, explaining, and discussing class activities and out-of-class assignments.

This handy checklist will help you think through various ways to make your assignment’s purpose, task, and criteria more transparent.

By combining recommendations for effective assignment design with principles of transparency and the value-expectancy theory of achievement motivation, this rubric will help you assess the quality and guide the design of your assignments. The rubric defines criteria characteristic of well-designed assignments; breaks the criteria down into concrete, measurable components; and suggests what evidence for each component might look like.