Transparency in Learning and Teaching

Quick Check

TRUE or FALSE: The Transparency Framework has a greater impact on the success of first generation college students.

TRUE: Correct!

Because these students come to our classes with less institutional knowledge and academic social capital, they benefit more from having assumptions spelled out for them, thus leveling the playing field, bridging equity gaps, and increasing their sense of belonging.
FALSE: Students who were not exposed to the knowledge about how to navigate college from family members appreciate the extra support of having expectations spelled out for them, but the extra specificity can help even experienced college students who need to parse the language used by a variety of instructors in different disciplines.

Check Answer

What is TILT?

The Transparency Framework, commonly known as TILT (Transparency in Learning and Teaching), is an inclusive pedagogy that can reduce equity gaps for all students.

There are four components in a TILTed assignment:

PURPOSE:

Most of us already describe the purpose of an assignment when we present it to students in class. The transparency framework asks us to explain that purpose in writing. What skills or knowledge will the students learn by doing this assignment? How does it connect to past work in the class? How will it help with future work in the class? What should students expect to remember from this in 5 months or even 5 years?

The purpose section of your TILTed assignment should contain three things: an overview or theme statement for the assignment, an idea of how the skills the assignment teaches might help them outside of the classroom, and a list of the aligned course outcomes.

TASK(S):

Do you ever have students ask a lot of questions or even fail to complete an assignment because they didn't understand the directions? TILT prompts us to break the assignment down into discrete and concrete steps and make sure they have the tools to complete each task. What is the ideal way of going about the assignment? What should they do first? Do they have options in how they can demonstrate mastery of the linked outcomes? What resources or previous lessons will help them? List (and link to them) in this section.

CRITERIA:

Do students ever sabotage their efforts by focusing too much on formatting and style for a response to an assignment that leaves out essential components, like a thesis or showing their work? Make clear exactly how the assignment will be evaluated so students know what to prioritize. If you are using a rubric (you should really use a rubric), publish it here, or at least the rubric categories and their point values.

EXAMPLE:

Provide an example of excellent work, one that achieves on the highest levels of the provided criteria.

In the official documentation, this is technically a subset of "criteria," but it has been set apart here because it often gets neglected, and it is often the most useful component to students. It can be argued that providing such an example might reduce the incentive for creative approaches to the assignment, but it is just as likely to give students the confidence to experiment, especially if the example is annotated to point out the baseline requirements and where they are encouraged to take license.

You can use DesignPLUS templates to easily convert your assignments into TILTed assignments.

Quick Check

Where does the transparency framework place the course outcomes the assignment is aligned with?

Purpose: Correct!

One purpose of the assignment is usually to assess student progress on course outcomes.
Task: To avoid confusion, the task section should be limited to a step by step process for completing the assignment.
Criteria: Maybe!

You can include course outcomes in the assignment rubric to track student progress in the learning mastery gradebook, but you wouldn't need to include them in this section as a grading criteria unless you were actually awarding points based on their performance on the outcome for that particular assignment.

Check Answer

Why TILT?

Each assignment (whether it's a discussion board, homework assignment, quiz) should have these components: PURPOSE, TASK, and CRITERIA. Take a look at just one of your own assignments. We typically know EXACTLY what we want students to do when we share an assignment, but the directions often suffer from our own "expert blind spot." Sometimes our assignments are missing the "why and how" and leave some students with questions that they may not even know how to ask.

Look at this example of a typical assignment format for a paper in Psychology. Many assignments come with unwritten rules and unstated assumptions. Can you spot some of them in the less transparent version of this assignment?

That they know the implied audience for this paper and how that should influence the tone.
That they know what a "philosophy of life" is or that they know the difference between changing the way we see the world and simply learning something.
That the student had theories about psychology before entering the class.
That the student knows how to narrow a topic, find sources about psychology, and integrate them with their own writing without plagiarizing (or that they even know what plagiarism is), and that they know where to get help with these skills if they realize they don't have them.
That they know how to plan and schedule time for the various stages of a research project - even a small one.
That they know how to scale their efforts to the size of the project.

Students who have grown up in a culture of education, whose parents have gone to college, or who know people with degrees will either understand these assumptions or have the social capital and resources to get the answers they need. Other students might not understand exactly what is being asked of them or what questions to ask to make it more clear.

This Transparency Framework prompts instructors to think through some of their assumptions and articulate some of the unwritten rules. In doing so, they help to reduce inequities and level the field for students by boosting their confidence, resilience, and sense of belonging. This results in higher success and retention rates.

A good exercise for any teacher is to share a non-TILTed assignment with a colleague from a different discipline, and ask them if they can clearly identify each of these components: purpose, task, criteria. If not, that's a good indication that the framework would improve your success rate.

How TILTing benefits instructors

Purpose

Thinking through this section can help an instructor prepare for assessment as they reflect on outcomes alignment.

It can also inspire them to come up with more creative and authentic assignments as they try to explain why the skills they are assessing might be relevant to their student's lives.

Coming up with a one sentence pitch for the assignment can also help instructors see what they really want students to get out of the assignment - and this will get communicated to students.

Task

Breaking the assignment into clear, discrete, concrete steps will allow instructors to get a better sense of what they are asking students to do, which might reveal a number of things:

- - What skills do students need to complete the assignment?
  - What resources will they need? Is there any terminology they may be unfamiliar with?
  - How much time will it take students to complete the assignment?
  - Are there optional steps? Or prescribed sequence?
  - If it is long sequence of steps, are there places to get feedback? Or should the assignment be broken into parts? Breaking the assignment into steps will reduce student confusion and frustration, which might result in fewer frantic late night emails or submissions that completely miss the mark.

Criteria

Unsurprisingly, the benefit here is the same as for creating a rubric for the assignment: clearly articulating their expectations and values.

By writing expectations outside of the rubric format, instructors can once again reinforce the main idea of the assignment and clarify their priorities.

Example

Providing a student example of excellent work, especially if it is annotated to point out essential elements, can help instructors further clarify their thoughts about what is valuable about the assignment.

Cognitive load and proportionality

Many instructors have expressed a very reasonable concern about overloading students with too much information, especially for less substantial assignments. Certainly it shouldn't take students more time to read the instructions than to do the work of the assignment.

Palmer, Gravett, and LaFleur have come up with a rubric for evaluating TILTed assignments. It also acts as a checklist that emphasizes different elements for different levels of assignments.

Examples

Discussion

Here is an example of a discussion board prompts that Peg Balachowski used in a Math& 146 course:

PURPOSE:

We have talked about bias in statistical sampling in class, and the data collection process and the sampling techniques used sometimes biases the responses participants give. We want to investigate different ways to collect unbiased responses (to the best of our ability) to make sure that our polling results reflect the actual way people feel about things, in this case the food at a hospital cafeteria.

TASK:

Review the 4 scenarios below. One of these scenarios represents the least biased sampling for the poll on cafeteria food. Choose the the one you think represents the least biased technique. You may need to go back and review sampling plans before you respond.

CRITERIA:

To receive full credit, please copy the plan you choose as best into your reply. Then identify why you chose this plan. Use the appropriate statistical language and definitions if needed. Your post should be at least 4 sentences long, and provide full support for your choice! Be sure to respond to at least one other student's post to receive full credit.

Case study

This example is from a case study in the same class:

PURPOSE:

We have been working through several a case studies to help bring statistics to life for you. These are actual studies that were done at various institutions and the data in this case study is real. However, this data set is a sample (subset) of the complete data set simply because of the large size of the original data set. The purpose is for you to become accustomed to not just the mechanics of data analysis (calculating various statistics and creating graphs) but to delve a little deeper by investigating important questions. In this case, we are asking whether people are embarrassed by their flatulence. The questions we will answer are: Are people without male siblings more embarrassed by their flatulence than people with one or more male siblings? Do people that come from households where flatulence was acceptable report less embarrassment than people that come from households where it was not acceptable? Are women or men more embarrassed by their flatus?

TASK:

The task for this case study is to calculate confidence intervals to answer some basic questions and to make comparisons. What skills will you need? Make sure you have reviewed the calculator directions for finding and using the confidence intervals. Remember that confidence intervals begin and end with parentheses, like this: (3.45, 7.26). They will also include units, such as (3.45, 7.26) minutes.

CRITERIA:

How will you know if you have been successful? First, you get the correct values for your confidence intervals, including units. Then answer the questions posed by this case study with complete sentences to support our decisions. Full credit will be given for reports that have a summary describing your steps.

Final Project

Here's an example of a TILTed Final Project:

PURPOSE:

This is a two-part cumulative assignment that will help me identify what information you have retained from the many different branches of Forensic Science that we studied during the quarter. The assessment will be two-fold process:

Identify critical elements of a crime scene by creating your own virtual mock crime scene
Analyze a classmate’s crime scene using the techniques we discussed in class. The skills you use in this assignment replicate the techniques and critical thinking needed to perform in this type of career.

This assignment covers the following Course Objectives:

Identify fields of science associated with forensic science.
Identify methods of collecting and preserving forensic evidence.

TASK:

Part One- You will use the information you have gained from at least five (5) of the Units we covered this winter quarter to create evidence in a Mock Crime Scene. You can choose from the following Units:

Crime Scene Investigation (photography, securing your scene, documentation)
Fingerprints
DNA
Blood Spatter
Questioned Documents/Handwriting Analysis
Chromatography
Forensic Anthropology (bones, body measurements…)
Death Investigations (Rigor, Algor, and/or Livor Mortis, Lividity)
Entomology
Shoe/Tool impressions
Casting
Firearms/Ballistics
Trajectory

After choosing five elements of Forensic Science to use as evidence, you will create a Mock Crime Scene in any format that suits your imagination and expertise. I have had video, PowerPoint, Minecraft, Legos, comic strips, shoebox/miniature scenes, and even students that turn an entire room into a crime scene for their submission.

Part Two- Analyze a classmate’s crime scene

Choose a classmate’s crime scene and record their name/title of crime scene
Identify at least three items of forensic evidence in that crime scene
State how you would document, collect, and preserve those items of evidence
Explain how those items could help solve the case
What conclusion can you draw from the items of evidence

CRITERIA:

Your mock crime scene and analysis will be evaluated using the following criteria:

Includes at least five items of forensic evidence from the above listed units
Shows understanding of how to document a crime scene
Correctly identifies how to collect, package, and preserve the items of evidence
Draws conclusions from evidence and scientific practices, not opinions

Sources

Examples and resources . TILT Higher Ed. https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources.

Gutierrez, P., Abbot, S., & Felton, P. (2018). Partnering with students in teaching and learning. The Toolbox: A Teaching and Learning Resource for Instructors , 17 (1).

MAWinkelmes . (2017). Transparency and problem-centered Learning . YouTube . https://youtu.be/xqUQhSKmD9U.

Palmer, M. S., Gravett, E. O., & LaFleur, J. (2018). Measuring transparency: A learning–focused assignment rubric. To Improve the Academy , 37 (2). https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.17063888.0037.205

Winkelmes, M.-A., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Weavil, K. H. (2016). A teaching intervention that increases underserved college students' success . Association of American Colleges & Universities. https://www.aacu.org/peerreview/2016/winter-spring/Winkelmes.