Successful Activities & Assignments
Participants at the 2009 Workshop for Early Career Geoscience Faculty developed this list of what makes activities and assignments successful.
Successful activities and assignments:
- Are relevant to students
- Reach students who are at different levels
- Provide opportunities for feedback and possibly improvement
- Are fun and memorable
- Fit within a course sequence: build on prior experiences and lead to future ones (scaffolding)
- Allow students to develop and test their own ideas
- Stretch students' thinking, allowing them to construct knowledge that is new for them
- Allow students to apply what they are learning to solve real-world problems, perhaps quantitatively (transfer of learning)
- Have clear goals
- Are time-effective
- Involve discovery: experiential
- Allow students to think creatively
- Have students work in small groups
- Is well-organized, with clear instructions: students know what they are supposed to do
- Is set up so that assessment is straightforward
- Allows students to be successful
- Supporting resources are accessible
