The assignment brief

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a pilot study conducted in The School of Engineering and Design at Brunel University, which considered how easily students could extract ‘meaningful’ information from an assignment brief. The study used two documents, a ‘standard’ module specific assignment brief (PB1), which used a proforma document issued by the Taught Programmes Office (TPO) and a ‘redesigned’ assessment brief (RB2), which also used the ‘basic’ proforma document as the design template. Both documents used the same data but the redesigned version used principles of Information Architecture to structure the data. The study used a designed questionnaire to elicit responses from students at Level 2, which compared and contrasted the two documents.