Bringing Student Interests Into the Classroom: The Use of Extension Assignments

In this post I want to talk about my use of “extension assignments” as a way to extend student learning in class and give students the ability to focus their learning, in a relatively low-stakes assignment, on material that interests them.

My extension assignments are 5-10 minute presentations on a topic of a student’s interest with an emphasis on what is happening now. I started doing extension assignments as a response to feedback from another class where a student noted that they wish they had more opportunity to dig into topics that they were interested in. In Psychology of Women & Gender, these assignments involve students choosing current topics/controversies in the field to focus on.  Extension assignments are different than research papers because I allow the use of popular press sources and don’t require that they use peer-reviewed journals.

I started using these types of assignments when I moved to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. When my classes were online, extension assignments were pre-recorded by students and then posted. Then I had an asynchronous class day where students would watch each extension assignment for that day and comment on them. These days were a nice break from synchronous online work, and students really enjoyed them.

However, when it was time to teach Psychology of Women & Gender again, I reconsidered having these be pre-recorded and decided to bring them back into the classroom, and – wow – I am glad I did. First, students definitely struggled with the technology of captioning the videos, and I felt as though that stress was interfering with their joy of learning from the assignment. Second, I want to be fully in-person and discuss these assignments and the issues they brought up in-person.

Presentations are supposed to be 5 or so minutes (they have run a bit long), and then I was hoping to have 5 minutes of discussion. However, discussions have gone long, and I actually had to schedule an additional day for extension assignments so that I could allow 15 minutes per assignment (instead of the 10 I had originally scheduled).

I’ve ended up with 4 extension assignment deadlines throughout the semester (5 students per day). Originally, my goal was to have students do extension assignments on topics that were covered immediately prior to their presentation day. However, I didn’t cleanly pull this off as people signed up based on the day and not the topic, and I didn’t make it clear that it should be tied to topic. So the topics students presented were not necessarily been linked to the specific course content preceding their presentation day. There were a few assignments that functioned as previewing future topics (e.g., the bury your gays trope is actually mentioned in the text but after a student presented an extension assignment on it). I actually think allowing students to pick any topic that interests them instead of having to link it to what was just covered in the book has helped students feel excited about their autonomy. I will have to decide if I want to change that in the future.

As you can see from the topics, they are wide ranging and timely. Some were about specific events that have happened and some more generally about trends and cultural phenomena. The discussions have been vibrant and engaging, and students have uniformly loved these projects. A few expressed that they wished we could do more than one – but we just don’t have time for that!