Low-Stakes Assignments

Many instructors ask students to complete and turn in frequent low-stakes assignments such as quizzes, reading reflections, short essays, problem sets, or other homework. They help scaffold the learning you want to happen by providing students practice and feedback on critical skills or content. They also provide structure to students' time in the course, create multiple checkpoints to keep students on track, and enable you to gauge and respond to their learning in an ongoing way. Systematic checkpoints are valuable across course formats, including in-person courses, but they are especially important in online courses because there are no other regular indicators of whether students are "getting it."

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This page lists several options for low stakes assignments. For students, (1) these provide multiple opportunities for students to practice, process and receive feedback in a low-stakes way, meaning (2) these take little time and tend to contribute only a small amount, if any, to their overall grade, thereby minimizing threat. For instructors, (a) these assignments provide information about how students are understanding the course material, while (b) taking minimal time to deploy and evaluate. The options below represent generalized categories, and we encourage you to be creative in adapting these ideas to design low-stakes occasions for students to practice and receive feedback on the skills and understandings that you want them to acquire across the semester.

  • Homeworks - Students complete problems that either follow up on or prepare them for material to be addressed during class or at a later time. Prompt feedback (as well as opportunities to revise their responses) yield the most benefits for student learning.
  • Focus Questions or Reading Worksheets/Guides - Students respond to a small number of open-ended questions about the reading or complete a reading guide, before class. Administering these electronically allows instructors to review responses before class to identify difficult or interesting points that might require deeper discussion during class. 
  • Reading Quizzes - These sets of closed-ended questions work best when they prompt students to process the material for meaning and larger themes, rather than highly specific information. Review student responses before class to identify difficult or interesting points that might require deeper discussion during class. Automatically graded reading quizzes can be completed to mastery or to a criterion (e.g., students must get 90% correct for full credit). Many online textbooks have these tools integrated, but they can also be programmed in Canvas.
  • Blogs or Discussion Board Posts - Students respond to a prompt in a group context. The prompt can be about anything relevant to the current topic: familiarity with an idea, experiences, reactions to readings, sharing resources, etc. Consider asking students to also respond to the posts of others in their group, and including instructor and/or GTAs participation. The latter signals whole-class community (not just students) and also allows the instructional team to keep the discussion focused.
  • Minute Papers - Much like they sound, these are abbreviated writing assignments in which students respond to a question posed during class that prompts them to process what they are learning and provides you with some insight into their learning (e.g., What is the most important idea we have discussed today? What points are still muddy to you?) Minute papers also fall under "classroom assessment techniques," as they constitute a quickly deployed way of seeing student thinking in real time.

 

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