If you want to see the best quality work that the students can do, then transparency is necessary. The quality of students’ work improves with transparent instruction because they can spend 100% of their working time doing their best quality work. Without transparency, many students spend a large portion of their time figuring out how to approach the work and/or how to acquire the needed resources. This reduces the amount of time they can spend actually doing the work, thus reducing work quality.
In some of our research studies, instructors in creative fields like performing arts, engineering, and architecture raised this question. They were concerned that providing examples to students might stifle their creativity. In these instances, we asked the instructors to share this pedagogical rationale when they explained the purpose of the assignments. For example, “The purpose of this assignment is for you to struggle and feel confused while you invent your own process and methods for addressing the problem…” We believe this helped to preserve the students’ sense of belonging and their academic confidence. Instead of doubting themselves, students expected to struggle through an intended period of feeling lost and they trusted that this would be followed by clarity and understanding. This may even have contributed to the students’ higher persistence and retention rates we saw in our studies.
The most time-efficient way to ensure transparency is to engage students in helping you TILT their learning experience! Invite students to parse the upcoming assignment or project by using the student version of the TILT Framework, called “Unwritten Rules: Decode Your Assignments and Decipher What’s Expected.” This is how to know for sure that the upcoming work is transparent, relevant, and accessible for your students and that they all have the necessary resources to complete it before the work begins. Students are the experts on how they understand and approach upcoming work. Invite students to parse the upcoming assignment or project by using the student version of the TILT Framework, called “Unwritten Rules: Decode Your Assignments and Decipher What’s Expected.” Investing a short amount of time (usually less than 5 – 10 min) before students begin the assignment saves you time in constructing the assignment prompt, and you are likely to spend less time explaining the work to individual students later, as well as less time grading the completed work.
The student version of the TILT Framework, called “Unwritten Rules: Decode Your Assignments and Decipher What’s Expected,” is a tool that improves students’ ability to interpret instructions and encourages them to recognize the value and applicability of what they will learn from an assignment. The framework engages students’ metacognition and engages them actively in parsing instructions and seeking clarity before they begin their work. Using the Framework once or twice in a course can encourage students to apply the framework to other academic assignments and projects.
Students can spend much of their allocated working time figuring out how to do an assignment, what the completed work might look like, and if they are working effectively. After that, they can do their best work that’s possible with the remaining time. The resulting grade is not a measure of the student’s their full understanding or the best work they can achieve. Rather it is an indicator of what the student has time to do after they spend a portion of their working time gathering necessary resources and figuring out an approach to the work. When students spend 100% of their allocated working time on carrying out an assignment, the quality of their work is a more accurate indicator of their understanding and best effort. College instructors who applied the TILT Framework in their teaching reported that the quality of students’ work improved and the amount of time spent grading that work decreased. Teachers usually do assign higher grades to higher quality work that demonstrates better understanding. [T. Howard. (June 2019). Journal of Political Science Education 16; M. Winkelmes et al.. (May 2015). National Teaching and Learning Forum 24). Ful citations are available on the TILT Examples & Resources webpage under the “Publications” heading.]
Yes! The Transparent Assignment Template is the visual artifact from communications between teachers and students in our study. We used it as a guide to help teachers and students think together — either online or in the classroom — about the purposes, tasks and criteria for academic work. Use it as a guide. As long as your communication with students results in their clear understanding of the purposes, tasks and criteria for their work before they start working, you can expect to see the kind of learning benefits we found in our study. When students use the Template to discuss your assignment prompts, they gain expertise in parsing assignments, and they help you to understand how to make the work more transparent for them before they begin doing it. When students using the Template reflect back to you that they understand the purposes, tasks and criteria for an assignment as you intended, that they can judge what successful work will look like, and that they have the resources and readiness they will need to complete the work, then you know you have achieved transparency.
If you incorporate transparent instruction at your own discretion, then you’ll be doing what the teachers in our study did. We asked teachers to offer transparency around the purposes, tasks and criteria for academic work in their courses in their own way at their own discretion. We offered a Transparent Assignment Template (for teachers and for students) and a small amount of training via onsite and online workshops. We intentionally avoided rigid protocols for how to adopt transparency in your instruction for two main reasons: 1) we expected variation; and 2) we wanted to demonstrate what teachers in a variety of higher education contexts around the country could expect if they adopted Transparent Assignment Design at their own discretion with the goal of improving students’ learning and increasing equitable opportunities for all students to succeed.
For advanced students, transparent instruction serves as an affirmation of what they understand, and also an important way to improve their metacognition. This helps them fully recognize the value of what they are learning in the classroom and how they can apply it elsewhere. Transparent instruction will also help them become more self-regulating learners who are better equipped to assess the success of their in-class contributions and to make adjustments accordingly that will improve the class meeting experience for all students.
Transparent instruction seems to benefit students across the disciplines and at all levels of expertise. We expected some of the greatest potential long-term benefits (on retention and graduate rates) would come from offering Transparent Assignment Design in introductory and intermediate-level courses, so we focused our main efforts there first. We saw higher retention rates into the third year of college for students who received transparent instruction in at least one course in their first year of college. The benefits for students in our studies are statistically significant (with effect sizes in the small to medium range). For underserved students (first-generation, ethnically underrepresented, low-income), the gains are larger (with effect sizes in the medium to large range). The gains are in three areas: 1) perceived skill development, 2) belonging, 3) confidence. (Winkelmes, Mary-Ann, Matthew Bernacki, Jeffrey Butler, Michelle Zochowski, Jennifer Golanics, and Kathryn Harriss Weavil. (2016). “A Teaching Intervention that Increases Underserved College Students’ Success.” Peer Review 18, 1 / 2, 31-36.) Some of the student benefits surprised us. For example, students in STEM courses felt the courses helped them improve their writing skills significantly, while students in enormous courses felt strongly that their instructors knew and valued them individually as students, and wanted them to succeed. In advanced undergraduate level courses, other transparent instructional methods are effective, including: offering running commentary in class about what kinds of disciplinary methods are in use, and inviting students to participate in class planning and agenda construction. A list of transparent methods offers more information.
Instructors who are beginning to apply transparency can sometimes include an overwhelming amount of transparency in an assignment prompt. This often happens when they discover that there are too many skills they want the students to practice at the same time while working on an assigned project. For introductory level students, too much information can become overwhelming and non-transparent because it asks students to focus on learning too many things simultaneously. Many instructors take a look at an assignment prompt and decide to divide it into several connected assignments that allow students to focus on one or two skills or learning goals at the same time. This allows space for students to practice skills, absorb feedback, reflect on the quality of their learning and then improve the quality of the work by revising it while the project is still underway.
A self-guided checklist is available, as well as a rubric that measures the amount of transparency in an assignment. (Palmer, Michael S., Gravett, Emily O., LaFleur, Jennifer. (2018). Measuring Transparency: A Learning-Focused Assignment Rubric. To Improve the Academy 37 (2), 173-187.)
Also check the videos, podcasts, example assignments and resources on the TILT Examples and Resources webpage, including these publications:
We are testing the impact of various ways of offering transparent instruction.We focused heavily on Transparent Assignment Design at the introductory and intermediate college levels, because we expected that would have the biggest possible benefit on college students’ retention and graduation rates, and their continued success in careers and/or post-graduate study. Read or listen about the impact of other types of transparent instruction in the “Talking About Transparent Instruction” and “Publications” sections on the TILT Examples and Resources webpage.
Please send your own examples and suggestions that you’d like to share on the TILT website to wink@tilthighered.com
There are many effective models. TILT works at the statewide and regional levels and with institutions to engage teams of instructors, staff, and administrators in transparent strategic planning and communication work that focuses on equitable student success goals.
Successful models include instructors, staff and administrators working together in a community of practice (or learning community). Centers for teaching and learning often organize faculty learning communities in collaboration with TILT.
We welcome your participation! There are several ways to get involved:
2009-2023 M.A. Winkelmes
TILT Higher Ed © 2009-2023 by Mary-Ann Winkelmes and materials on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) except where otherwise noted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/