9.4 Conclusions and Caveats
I would definitely use this assignment again, but I would structure a few things differently.
- I’d keep each of the three components of the methods presentation. However, next time would weigh the Extensions component much more heavily so that my assessment matches the importance of this component of the assignment. I have often heard that students use the weight of how something is graded to decided how much time and energy to put into a component of the course, and to decide how much I, as their professor, value a particular component. Fortunately, this time around the students engaged with it for the excitement and joy of designing their own research. I would reweight it because I saw firsthand the extraordinary value in this kind of imaginative Extension exercise to their ability to synthesize what they had learned. It helped them to make sense of their learning to the point where they could apply it in another context entirely.
- I didn’t actually tell my students I was using an assessment framework called ICE. In retrospect, I would do that differently because I think that the assignment would have been even more effective if the students had understood how I was approaching both the design and assessment of the assignment through ICE. Using ICE helped to clarify my own thinking about what I wanted the students to get out of the assignment. If I had talked to them about this assessment strategy from the beginning, I think it would have helped clarity the goals for them as well. ICE helped me design the assignment in a clear way so that students could understand what was expected of them in terms of outputs and assessment. It also helped me to design the assignment in a way that pushed the students into some real-world applications.
- In the future, when I introduce the assignment at the beginning of the unit on methods, I will draw attention to the rubric so that students understood how they are going to be assessed.
I used ICE as an afterthought because I needed some help with my rubric. Now that I see the way it turned my assignment away from a focus on knowledge recall to knowledge application and meaning-making, I’ll be much more intentional about how and why I use it.
Many people will read this book who have been teaching at the post-secondary level for decades. My simple approach to ICE won’t likely inspire new ideas in your own work. But for those of you who, like me, are at the early stages of post-secondary teaching, I highly recommend ICE, above all for its simplicity and flexibility. As I found out, it is much more than an assessment tool. It helps educators design assignments that truly engage.
