Designing for the struggle | Blog of the APA

When I create assignment prompts, my instructions explain both the what and the why. I include a brief statement explaining the value the assignment offers. My rationales consistently cite skills (sometimes intellectual virtues) that are valuable for any career: reading skills, analytical thinking, creative problem solving, and the like.

Skill development isn’t passive. Despite students’ wishes, they cannot absorb intellectual skills via some magical process akin to osmosis. Skill development requires practice and struggle. As such, I explain that the best place to look for value in our assignments is not the end product, such as the paper a student submits. Instead, much of the value is found in the process, such as writing the paper.

This fits nicely with what Ronni Gura Sadovsky describes as the striving framework for assessment in a recent blog post for this series. She explains this as a framework where “we think of the grading scheme as analogous to the score in a game: a tool to help structure students’ motivation.”

Sadovsky’s framework is inspired by C. Thi Nguyen’s account of striving play in his book Games: Agency as Art. Ordinarily, our motivation has the structure of adopting some means for the sake of achieving an end. However, Nguyen describes striving play as inverting this usual structure. In Nguyen’s striving play, we adopt the goal of winning a game not for the sake of winning (or anything that follows from it) but instead for the sake of the struggle created by our trying to win.

I agree with Sadovsky that thinking about the structure of value in assessments according to this striving framework can helpfully guide course design. Imagine you’re creating a paper assignment. The grading criteria should obviously track the features of a quality paper. However, it’s also important to consider what kind of struggle will be created when students adopt the goal of meeting your criteria for an A-grade (or at least for passing). In this post, I offer some reflections on how my course design has recently been guided by explicitly attending to the kind of struggle and striving I want to provide for students.

In my ethics courses, we discuss theories of meaningful lives, and I assign students a journal and reflection assignment. The journals require students to give examples of things they think provide their life with meaning, to reflect on how those things provide meaning, and to reflect on whether they can imagine anything that would lead them to doubt that these things have the ability to provide meaning. Finally, the reflection portion of the assignment has students return to the assigned reading, reflect on how their journals affect their perception of the reading, and reflect on how the reading might lead them to see the examples from their journals in a new light.

Students surely focus on getting a good grade. However, my hope is that by striving for that grade, students are forced to engage in a struggle of applying philosophical ideas to their own lived experience. The struggle is meant to help students develop skills of applying abstract ideas to concrete cases, making novel connections between ideas, using theoretical tools to produce a more reflective understanding of examples, and using examples to better understand the mechanics and limits of a theory.

The assignment details need to be designed carefully to support the right kind of struggle. If students struggle too much with organizing their thoughts or meeting various formatting requirements, that takes away from their ability to focus their attention on the kind of struggle I’m aiming to create. I thereby designed the assignment so that the formatting and organization are completed for students. I provide pre-formatted sections for the journals and the reflection page; students just need to fill in the information. Alternatively, I leave the description of the content open-ended. When I ask students to find reading passages that capture their attention more after doing the journals, I don’t ask students to reflect on any specific aspect of the passage. I don’t ask if the ideas in the passage make more sense, whether the ideas seem more or less plausible, or whether they now notice some implications they previously missed. All these things come up, but the instructions leave it to students to determine which aspects to focus on since the purpose of the assignment is for students to struggle to make their own connections. My design choices are meant to make the formatting and organizational issues recede into the background so students can better focus on the kind of struggle the assignment is meant to frame.

A second example concerns reading skills. Recent anecdotes and studies highlight weak reading skills amongst college students. I teach several general education courses each year. Many of my students are (initially) there simply to meet a general education requirement. However, even if many of them never take another philosophy course, they all need strong reading skills. I want to help them develop the strong reading skills that are important to success in almost any career.

When I look back on my first few introductory philosophy courses, what I most remember is jumping into primary philosophy sources and feeling as if I were reading a foreign language. The way philosophers talked felt unfamiliar compared to what I encountered in my everyday life and my ordinary reading. It was one of the first times in my academic career that it felt challenging just to decipher what was happening in the text. Encountering an unfamiliar writing style like this can help induce a struggle that forces you to exercise your reading skills.

A recent challenge for facilitating this kind of struggle with complex texts is increasing access to generative AI. Using AI to summarize difficult readings may seem innocuous compared to generating course papers in full. Students are pressed for time, balancing schoolwork with jobs, families, relationships, and much more. Shouldn’t we value the efficiency of using AI to quickly generate a summary of central points and arguments in more familiar, easily digestible language? Pushing students to spend more time with more difficult texts can seem as if we’re making things more difficult simply because those tools weren’t available to us when we were students.

But this mistakenly assumes all educational value is found in the end product a student submits. However, again, the point isn’t merely to arrive at an understanding of the text. The process can be just as educationally important. You need the experience of struggling to dissect a text slightly above your current ability to improve those skills. If you use AI to skip the hard work of breaking down and interpreting the more complex text yourself, then you won’t be able to improve those skills.

One objection to this is that students still exercise reading comprehension skills when interpreting the AI-generated summary. However, students can continuously prompt the AI to rewrite at lower complexity levels (e.g., ‘explain it to me like I’m five’) until they get an output that requires the least amount of interpretive effort on their part. Students are thereby less likely to engage in the kind of striving in their reading that is necessary for strengthening these skills.

However, the same problems can arise independently of AI. Like others, at the beginning of the pandemic, our university moved to fully online courses. I worked hard to create interactive videos on various philosophical topics for my students. The videos were a huge success. So, I continued using the videos and adopted a flipped classroom when our university returned to face-to-face instruction. Being able to repeat and review these videos helped students achieve a better understanding of course content, and this was reflected in higher averages on quizzes and exams.

Unfortunately, I started to suspect many students were using my videos as a replacement rather than a supplement to the assigned readings. Supplying these videos may have led to a better understanding of the specific philosophical ideas covered in class, but their understanding did not translate into a better ability to read and understand new, complex texts they encountered during class discussions. My mistake was that I was so focused on my goals for student achievement that I forgot about the experience of striving I aimed to create.

Obviously, I didn’t want to abandon the videos since they seemed to genuinely help students understand the material. Nonetheless, I also wanted my course to facilitate the experience of struggling to dissect complex readings themselves.

My solution during Spring 2025 was to introduce a relatively traditional passage analysis assessment. I used closed-book, closed-note, 50-minute assessments where students were given a passage from our assigned reading and asked to provide an analysis. Students needed to give their own summary, identify and explain keywords and phrases from the passage, break down ideas into smaller components and explain how different parts related to one another, and then explain how the passage fit into the larger context of that author’s ideas or the relevant philosophical topic.

Part of the goal of this assessment is to motivate students to spend more time engaging with the more complex text outside of class instead of relying solely on my videos or AI summaries. Students knew they were going to be confronted with a substantial passage from the assigned reading during these in-class assessments. The more time they spent engaging with the reading, the more likely they would be familiar with the specifics of the passage during the assessment.

Some students surely still skipped the reading and relied only on my videos or AI to study. But, even if they skipped the reading when it was originally assigned, they at least needed to read and struggle with the text during the in-class assessment. Giving an accurate explanation of central ideas and arguments they remembered from the videos or AI summaries of the author’s work was insufficient to do well. The grading criteria required students to connect their answers to the specifics of the chosen passage.

These assessments are not particularly innovative. However, I hope they illustrate how focusing on the struggle or the kind of striving you aim to create can help guide course choices. Moreover, I think this also starts to illustrate the kind of approach we should use to address AI in the classroom. I don’t think outright bans on AI are the correct approach since any ban is practically impossible to enforce. Moreover, I think AI can be educationally beneficial when used correctly. However, when AI is used as a more ‘efficient’ way to produce an intellectual product, it often circumvents the process of struggle essential to education. We must work to design our assignments, courses, and their environment in ways that facilitate appropriate struggles, even given the ubiquitous access to AI. In-class assessments are surely helpful, but they are only one piece of the puzzle at best.