One of the best ways to help your students on assignments is to make sure your instructions and expectations are clear. When students understand why something is being assigned and how to do it, they are less stressed, more engaged, and perform better. These small changes can have big benefits, which are even larger for under-served students.

One method of clarifying assignments is Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT). The TILT method asks instructors to emphasize three categories—purpose, tasks, and criteria—in order to ensure that students understand both the specific steps required to complete the assignment and its relationship to the larger course content and goals.

What's the Problem and How does TILT Help Solve It?

Students typically face barriers in these four categories:

• Preparation: Students may be unclear about college-level expectations, under-prepared with skills, or don’t know how to connect the assignment with prior knowledge.
• Motivation: Students may suffer from a lack of examples, anxiety or low self-confidence, they don’t see the relevance of the assignment, and they’re reluctant to ask for help.
• Time Management: Students often struggle with procrastination, underestimate an assignment’s time requirement, and have competing time commitments.
• Access to Resources: Many students don’t know how or when to get help, or don’t have time to seek it.

Transparently designed assignments mitigate these barriers by highlighting what's important in your teaching, ensuring that your students understand their assignments not as an isolated task or benchmark but as part of the larger course goals. When faculty present their expectations clearly and get students interacting while they write, [students overwhelmingly report deeper learning.]

Transparently designed assignments have several other clear benefits. Most importantly, they offer equitable opportunities for college students to succeed. Even many high-achieving high school students did not learn strategies for college success, particularly the expectations of their chosen discipline, like tools, methodologies, and discipline-specific genres. Not explicitly informing of these students limits who can succeed in our disciplines and stunts future researchers from developing the field.

How to TILT an Assignment

You're probably already used to thinking about the purpose and grading criteria for assignments—what's likely going to be new here with TILT is considering the tasks of the assignment chronologically. A TILTed assignment shows students what steps will move them through the process of completing the assignment (perhaps including steps on what not to do, and steps where help might be needed). TILTing can also draw attention to how long different steps might take. Your assignment might end up structured like this:

• Nutshell Description of Assignment
  • How might you briefly explain the assignment? No need for in-depth explanation, that will come later.
• Purpose
  • What is the connection between this learning activity and the course goals?
  • What knowledge will students gain by engaging in the activity?
  • What skills will students practice by engaging in the activity?
  • How might the knowledge and skills of this assignment be relevant and useful to students’ lives beyond this course, the major, and the degree?
• Tasks
  • List all steps until the students submit their assignment; while the steps are in order, the process they describe can be recursive.
  • This task list is to guide students through an appropriately complex process for the task, not to oversimplify the work.
  • What are some unnecessary steps that students should avoid, so as not to waste their time?
  • What advice do you have for students about focusing their time efficiently to produce the highest quality of work possible in the time given?
  • What are some hurdles you expect students to face?
• Criteria
  • What criteria, in the form of a checklist, could students use while working to determine whether they are completing the assignment efficiently and effectively?
  • How does excellent work differ from adequate work on this assignment?
  • What real-world samples can students use (with your help) to apply the checklist of criteria before they start their own work so they can understand how each criterion would look in practice?

For further information, check out WID's TILT Template (docx).