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And #11 Successful Students Learn Independently
16 Dealing With Assignments
Understanding your first assignment.
The number of assignments you will receive in a semester often surprises students. For some students, figuring out how to manage assignments is a new experience. For others who have had assignments in the past, the amount of work needed to complete assignments at the college level is what is unexpected. Most of the assignments you will receive will take longer than one session of study to complete. You will likely need to work on your assignment over several days or weeks. In this section, we will provide you with advice on how to understand the requirements of your assignment, and how to manage and track the tasks you will need to complete. We will provide you with some time management tips and an assignment tracker to try.
Assignment Terms
Assignment questions, outlines and marking schemes, breaking down large assignments.
How to breakdown assignments into tasks
- Understand the assignment: Read the assignment instructions carefully, and make sure you understand what is required. If you do not understand what you need to do, ask your professor as soon as possible.
- Create a task list: What are the smaller tasks you need to do to complete this assignment? Smaller tasks are activities like conducting research at the library or setting up group meetings for a group project.
- Create a timeline: Create a timeline that includes all the tasks that need to be completed. Consider how much time you will need to complete that task and when you will work on it. Set due dates for each task.
- Brainstorm ideas: Before you start writing, brainstorm ideas for the assignment. Think about the main points you want to cover, any research you need to do, and any supporting evidence you might need.
- Create an outline: Once you have a list of ideas, create an outline for your assignment. An outline can help you organize your thoughts and make sure you cover all the necessary points.
- Schedule time for research: Do your research before you begin writing. As you find sources, gather the information you will need to create a reference and take notes about essential information the source will provide and where this information fits in with your outline.
- Schedule time for revision: Plan to review your work before you submit. This can include checking your work against the assignment instructions or rubric, making changes to the content, and proofreading.
Here is an example of this process:
Key Takeaway from video
- Breaking down a large or medium-sized assignment into smaller pieces can help reduce stress, ensure completion of all parts of the assignment, and allow you to get other important tasks done too.
Using an Assignment Tracker
Time Management Considerations
Time management is the practice of organizing and prioritizing one’s activities and tasks effectively in order to maximize productivity and achieve one’s goals. For college students, time management involves creating a plan for allocating their time efficiently and balancing academic responsibilities with social activities, work, and personal obligations. It requires identifying tasks and goals, setting realistic deadlines, and using tools such as schedules, to-do lists, and reminders to stay on track. Effective time management helps students to reduce stress, increase productivity, and achieve academic success while still enjoying a balanced lifestyle.
- Procrastination: Students tend to put off starting a large writing assignment until the last minute, leaving themselves with insufficient time to complete the assignment.
- Lack of Planning: Many students do not adequately plan their time for the writing process, which can result in poor time management and a lower quality of work.
- Perfectionism: Students may spend too much time trying to perfect every aspect of their writing, which can lead to time wastage and increased stress.
- Break the Task into Smaller Parts: Instead of attempting to complete the entire assignment in one sitting, break it down into smaller, more manageable parts, and set specific deadlines for each.
- Create a Schedule: Create a schedule for the writing process and stick to it. This will help you stay on track and ensure that you have enough time to complete the assignment.
- Avoid Distractions: Avoid any distractions that can lead to time wastage, such as social media, television, and video games.
- Set Priorities: Set priorities for your writing tasks, focusing on the most critical aspects of the assignment first.
- Use Writing Tools : Utilize writing tools such as spell check, grammar check, and citation generators to save time and reduce the need for extensive revisions.
- Take Breaks: Taking regular breaks can help you stay focused and prevent burnout, ensuring that you produce your best work.
Avoiding Procrastination
Key Takeaways
Want more? The Learning Portal has more ideas for Managing Assignments.
A Guide for Successful Students 2nd ed. Copyright © 2023 by Irene Stewart, Aaron Maisonville, and Nicolai Zriachev, St. Clair College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.
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11 Types of Assignments You’ll Write In College This Year
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by Antony W
February 2, 2024
This is the complete list of the types of assignments that you will come across in high school, college, and university this year and beyond.
Types of Assignments: The Complete List for High School and College Students
The following is the complete list of the types of assignments that you will do in school. Whether you’re in high school, college, or university, this list is worth checking.
1. Essay Assignments
Essay assignments give students a chance to express and back up their thought with explanations, statements, facts, and analysis.
Although an essay can have as many paragraphs to express various ideas, the basic format is the 5-paragraph structure, which already includes the introduction, body, and conclusion.
Other than the structure, it’s also important to know about the types of essays . These include argumentative, persuasive, analytic, and expository essays.
An analytic essay will disintegrate issues into solutions. An expository essay provides explanations to things. Then an argumentative essay attests topics to give proof.
2. Memo Assignments
Memos are assignments that require students to provide short reports such as a monthly sales report. Memorandum assignments are good because they help cultivate conciseness in students.
That’s so because a memo should be short and precise providing only what is important to the reader.
In addition, memos can either request or share important information, and is therefore important to keep it clear.
3. Presentation Skills Assignments
Your instructor may ask you, as an individual or in a group, to go in front of the class and present certain ideas. They do this to see how well students can be at representing ideas to a crowd.
Adequate preparation is the key when it comes to creating presentations. At the end of the day, the last thing you ever want to do is to get nervous in front of other students.
More importantly, presenting ideas as a group is good because it helps you to cultivate collaborative skills.
4. Flowchart Assignments
Flowcharts represent processes or workflow of events using boxes connected together with arrow. Students will use flowcharts to show step-by-step procedures to solve given tasks.
For example, they can use flowcharts to represent service or administrative processes, manufacturing processes, or project plans.
5. Project Report Assignments
Project report assignments are to be written in future tense if the goals intended are yet to be met and in past tense where the intended goal has been achieved.
This assignment provides stakeholders with a brief preview of the projects at hand and clues whether a given project will be a success or will need improvement to meet the set goal. Students should also draft their reports with factual details.
A report should have the following arrangement:
- Acknowledgements
- Table of content
- Introduction
The body should not feature any subtitles. The conclusion, on the other hand, should feature recommendations, references, and appendices.
The aim of having project reports is to ensure students are capable of organizing both their works and goals.
6. Reflective Journal Assignments
A reflective journal is one of the types of assignments that require students to write what they understand according to what they think.
Most students who find reflective assignments hard to do can always request academic writing help from the experts in their areas of study.
7. Research Paper Assignments
With research paper assignments, students are supposed to choose topics they can explore as they come up with explanations to support their investigation.
In this assignment, students are to survey their research to understand the study that they carry out. A good research paper will feature findings that check and marge with the hypothesis .
A good example of a research paper assignment that your teacher may ask you to write is a theology paper .
8. Case study Assignments
The goal of the case study assignment is to find out whether or not students can investigate situations.
The assignment will suggest scenarios to students for a given study and provide secondary or subordinate questions. It is the work of the student to treat the scenario as real. That way, they can get the right answers for the given case study within the shortest time possible.
A case study response should be authentic, reasonable, and based on facts. In a case study assignment, students are at liberty of having politicians, the public, and professionals as their audiences.
When it comes to writing, you have to avoid the use of a massive block of words instead but make the findings should be precise and direct to the point.
8. Wiki Assignments
Wiki assignments involve putting together information modified to about any imaginary audience. Wikis let students share their ideas and provide supportive pieces of evidence to illustrate amalgamation of understanding.
Wiki is another way of telling students the importance of collaborating with fellow students, as it allows them to come up with their own posts on given studies.
Students are at liberty of creating a list, writing research questions, or starting discussions. They are also able to comment and edit any document shared. Or they can collaborate and come up with a single well-researched and detailed post.
This is one of the simplest assignments you will ever come across in school. You can get wiki free and inexpensive wikis on websites like Wikispaces, PBwiki and Wetpaint.
Lastly, a wiki is among the tools used in colleges to help students get to an immense diversification of instructional targets.
9. Literature Review Assignments
A literature review assignment is an important pedagogical tool for students in college. Depending on the given scenario or topic, students have to validate answers by studying given literatures.
Students are supposed to use the official language and maintain high levels of literature as they prepare literature reviews.
While writing this assignment, you are encouraged to have an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction grabs the attention of the reader, the body explains the main idea and the conclusion tells the reader the overall summary of your study.
Apart from providing similarities and differences after evaluating more than one source, you are still supposed to give their conclusive judgments.
10. Personal Narrative Assignments
Most lecturers allocate 5% to 10% of their overall grade to personal narrative assignments.
Personal narrative essays are two pages long, which means students should always provide brief answers to the topic.
Most lecturers use this assignment to get to know their students as the semester kicks off.
11. Annotated Bibliography Assignments
Annotated Bibliography is a type of college assignment that requires students to gather related findings relevant to the topic under investigation arranged alphabetically.
Annotated bibliography assignment also requires students to use the official language and be as objective as possible.
A good annotated bibliography should have a summary of the assignment in the first section. The assignment checks whether students are collect and recognize literature relating to given topics.
About the author
Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.
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