About these assignments

As part of our research for our latest major research report, The Opportunity Myth, we collected nearly 5,000 assignments from five school systems during a one-year period. Participating teachers submitted every assignment they offered students over the course of three weeks of lessons: one in the beginning of the school year, one in the middle, and one at the end of the year.

The assignment examples included in this student work library illustrate trends in strengths and weaknesses in reading comprehension and math instruction across grade levels.

ABOUT OUR RATINGS

To assess the quality of each assignment, we looked at three categories:

• Content: alignment with grade/course-appropriate standards
• Practice: opportunity to engage in key content-specific practices, and
• Relevance: connecting and applying content to the real world.

We gave each assignment a rating from 0-2 for each category, for a total “score” of 0-6. Overall, "weakly aligned" assignments scored an average close to 0; "partially aligned" assignments scored an average close to 3; and "strongly aligned" assignments close to 6.

The assignments we've identified as "strongly aligned" are not necessarily exemplars. Rather, they are some of the strongest examples we collected in our research, according to the criteria in our student work review tool.

assignment trends

In our review of the assignments we collected, we noticed the following trends: 

In English language arts (ELA), a high-quality text should be at the center of every lesson. For this reason, an assignment could not score above "weakly aligned" if it did not include a high-quality, grade-appropriate text. Based on our rubric, "partially aligned" assignments are tasks that have a high-quality, grade-appropriate text at the center, but don’t ask kids to do anything meaningful or appropriate to grade-level standards with that text. 

Many of our strongest ELA assignments included extended writing, while many of the weakest ones were multiple choice. This does not mean that all multiple choice is bad or that all extended writing is good; we do see some examples of assignments bucking both of those trends. But on the whole, we found assignments that offered students the opportunity to write more extensively (relative to their grade) earned overall higher scores.

We saw a lot of isolated language practice in ELA (e.g., vocabulary definitions, spelling lists, verb conjugation practice sheets). We chose to focus the examples in the Student Work Library on reading-comprehension-focused tasks rather than language-focused tasks. Ideally, language instruction and practice should occur in the context of authentic reading and writing, but in the lessons we observed, the volume of isolated skills practice was overwhelming. While we did not include these weak examples within our library, we did find that the strongest opportunities we saw to practice language skills were embedded within reading comprehension assignments, and are therefore reflected in our "strongly aligned" examples.

Finally, we did not include Reading Foundational Skills assignments in our library, mainly because we did not have a comprehensive enough set to show examples of weak, partial, and strong alignment at each grade level. 

In math, students should spend their time on problems and tasks that are focused on the grade-level standards and target the appropriate aspect of rigor (procedural, conceptual, or application). In our sample, the strongest assignments ensured that students had the opportunity to apply their mathematical knowledge and skill to problems and tasks that were on grade level while also strategically employing the Standards for Mathematical Practice. 

We saw many assignments that focused on the wrong aspect of rigor, as when students were asked to employ a rote procedure or a math “trick” over and over when they should have been building their understanding of a concept. (For example, we saw students asked to apply the keep-change-flip rule to divide fractions when they should be asked to deeply understand the division of fractions.)