Abstract
This chapter presents sample syllabi, learning activities, and rubrics with annotations with accompanying rationales for each of the choices made in the assignment design. The materials are annotated within the context of the book’s themes to serve as examples.
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Notes
- 1.
This question was our first real attempt to ask skills assessment-type questions, not just exam questions. It was useful in the sense that gender-reveal parties were familiar to most students and so were a rich topic to analyze and demonstrate new language and concepts. However, the prevalence of pop feminist critiques of gender reveal parties in several online publications quickly made this question too prone to plagiarizing others’ insights.
- 2.
This question was effective at seeing students’ emerging analytical skills. Could a student analyze the voiceover and imagery of the commercial, or merely describe it? This question also was a good litmus test of students’ integration of new language. Most students readily grasp that the concept of “gender ranking” would be important to discuss in their answer, while other students would rely mostly on language that they had coming into the course, i.e., that the commercial was “degrading.”
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- 4.
This assessment question was very effective at illustrating which students were acquiring (or already had) macro-level thinking and analysis skills. Many students would only discuss the individual-level harms depicted in the story, and those same students tended to respond to the prompt by personalizing it (describing how they would feel or describing how something similar had happened to them). Students who exhibited macro-level thinking and analysis would be able to name the ideologies and institutions that contributed to what the story calls “sexual cyberbullying.”
- 5.
This is an example of an assessment question that honestly wasn’t that effective. It was structured as a fairly typical short essay-style format and tended to elicit student responses that were rather descriptive and summaries of course readings. We discontinued this question for those reasons, because it didn’t align with the student learning outcomes that we were striving for.
- 6.
We loved this question and were sad to retire it due to Lil Wayne’s decreasing cultural relevance. This short video clip (with captions) was a fantastic test of students’ intersectional analysis skills and really highlighted their development over the semester. Students frequently referred back to their “aha” insights in answering this question in their reflective essays as well. Finding a clip or image or reading that works so well is enormously difficult for lots of reasons (e.g., finding something that can’t easily be googled to find a feminist critique), but it really pays off in terms of measuring student learning.
- 7.
Weekly small group discussions are important for practicing new language and for seeing the divergent entry points that classmates bring. It can offer an opportunity for surfacing misconceptions as well as to practice the process skills of perspective-taking and negotiating multiple points of view. Analysis skills are also embedded into the learning task because students are asked to apply concepts from readings to new texts or examples. This assignment worked well to get students talking to each other but requires some set up because of prior expectations students might have for online courses where discussion is not very interactive.
- 8.
Unit reflection papers are an opportunity for students to cultivate metacognition (by asking questions, surfacing issues that emerge in discussion, and posing questions about the topics of discussion). Likewise, it is an opportunity to practice analysis skills, and to reflect on the process work of class discussions. Some students are not used to this genre of writing (one that is reflective and integrative) and may require explicit instruction or permission to write informally.
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Hassel, H., Launius, C., Rensing, S. (2021). Annotated Examples of Assessments and Rubrics. In: A Guide to Teaching Introductory Women’s and Gender Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71785-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71785-8_5
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