Below, you can find prompt development guidance compiled by the 2024 Summer OLE Core Assessment Workshop Team based on their experiences scoring OLE Core artifacts and patterns observed across the years. You can also find examples of effective assignment prompts here.
- Become intimately familiar with the structure and components of the Intended Learning Outcome (ILO) itself. How do you (and the college) understand the operative terms of the ILO, and how do those definitions relate to your course or assignment? For example, what does it mean to “examine,” “reflect on,” or “critically interpret” something in your discipline?
- Students tend to produce better results when given explicit instructions about what is expected. Prompts that ask students to synthesize or reflect on a whole semester of material, for instance, are less likely to generate student work that clearly demonstrates the knowledge or skills described by the ILO.
- Direct assessments of student work provide evidence of students’ ability to articulate and show their learning in the class. Through direct assessment, the college is looking for evidence that students demonstrated the intended learning, not that students have been exposed to it or should have learned it over the course of all class materials/assignments.
- Choosing a component of a larger project that matches the ILO or a smaller, more targeted assignment that directly addresses the ILO can provide a more accurate estimate of students’ learning.
- This does not preclude the importance of other course goals, but rather emphasizes a more intentional mapping between ILOs (OLE Core-related or otherwise) and what you are asking of students, which can help students produce higher-quality work and more readily make the connection between their assignments and what they are learning. Think about embedding the ILO somewhere in the assignment prompt to make this connection more explicit.
- Make use of existing resources, both internal and external:
- Consult the rubric that will be used to score your artifacts.
- Consult with department colleagues, librarians, or others with experience in academic assessment or expertise in the area being assessed to get suggestions/examples of successful prompts and/or feedback on your proposed prompt.
- Consult Bloom’s Taxonomy for guidance on definitions of learning activities for assessment.
- Think about the ways your assignment and the resulting student work can be used more broadly, such as in departmental assessment activities or to inform your own teaching and curriculum adjustments.
- Options for prompt crafting:
- Start with the ILO language and adjust it to fit your course/assignment, using the same terminology.
- Start from your assignment prompt and thread the ILO language into the prompt.
- Illustrate the ways your assignment prompt components map onto the ILO components and adjust if the mapping has gaps or ambiguities.
ILO-Specific Guidance:
Each year’s Assessment Workshop Team has also shared prompt development guidance more targeted to particular OLE Core ILOs.
First-Year Seminar/Writing and Rhetoric
- FYS ILO 2: When students “utilize” sources in research papers or similar products, asking students to include in-text citations, rather than just a bibliography, prompts them to show how they are using these sources in context and demonstrates a deeper understanding of the material.
- FYS ILO 4/WRR ILO 5: Ensure that you are prompting students to “reflect on their learning” and “articulate how they will apply it to their college experience” by asking for examples of how they plan to apply what they learned in the future.
Ethical Reasoning in Context
- ILO 1: The most effective prompts require students to compare between different perspectives and ask them to specify the relationship between these perspectives.
- For both ILOs 1 and 2, ensure that students understand what constitutes an “ethical perspective,” as students often seem to view moral judgments (this is good/bad) as equivalent to ethical perspectives.
OLE Experience in Practice
- ILO 1: Ensure your prompt addresses and defines important terms such as “vocation” (St. Olaf uses this definition) so that students can accurately describe their “emerging vocational and/or academic interests.”
- ILO 2: Prompts should direct students to make connections between current/prior coursework and their OEP experience, using specific examples.
Power and Race
- ILO 1: Ensure that the prompt explicitly asks students to consider “ideas about race and ethnicity,” especially if they are primarily addressing concepts that may be more tangentially related to these ideas (e.g., immigration).
- ILO 2: Consider what “culture” and “cultural differences” mean in the context of your course.
- ILO 4: Attend to the ways that your prompt asks students to critically reflect on their own experiences and identity, rather than what they may have learned in the course more generally.
Religion, Faith, and Values
- Note the nuances between ILOs 2 and 3 (“how religious life shapes the world” vs. “how the world shapes religious life”) and ensure your assignment prompt specifies the intended directionality.