Designing Complex Tasks to Promote Learning (Chapter 5)

    Design complex tasks is the mandate described in chapter 5 of Karin Hess’s book Rigor by Design not Chance: Deeper Thinking Through Actionable Instruction and Assessment. Recall from earlier chapters that the goal of deeper learning is to prepare students students for high achievement and is evidenced by “a classroom culture where thinking is the norm.” (p.8). It stands to reason that assessments should be authentic and support student engagement, learning, and academic growth; cue high quality performance based assessments, PBA’s. Hess cautions that not all PBA’s are high quality and that they have evolved over time.

    The tasks of PBA’s may be simple and relate to near transfer of learning or may be more complex and with opportunities for creative or critical thinking and support far transfer of learning. Hess argues that, high quality performance-based assessments could be designed solely by teachers, they would be more meaningful if students were given the opportunity “to take an active role in designing and assessing their own learning” (p.94). Hess notes seven common characteristics of high-quality PBA’s that further stretch student thinking: they have open-ended contexts, productively challenge students, uncover thinking, promote authentic doing and sharing, stretch student thinking by integrating academic knowledge with personal skills and student input, require far transfer, and spark reflective and metacognitive thinking. Further, Hess provides many examples of deep complex tasks that could be implemented in the classroom.

    Reading this chapter had me reflecting on my mathematics methods class when the professor showed the class how to include performance-based assessment using fraction tiles rather than a typical pencil and paper assessment using a standard algorithm. I sought out an academic article related to performance-based assessments in mathematics that moved beyond what Hess’s description “asking students to solve a mathematics problem using one strategy and then to use another approach to prove that the solution is correct” (p.95) or the problem-based performance task to find buried treasure (p.119). This brought me to an academic paper written in 2008 by Allison Heyl, Fostering Engagement for Students from Low-Socioeconomic Status Backgrounds using Project-Based Mathematics.

    The big idea of Heyl’s work echoes Hess’s chapter that project based learning results in increased engagement among students from a low socioeconomic background. Unlike Hess’s chapter which guides teachers to create tasks, Heyl focused on a specific Interactive Mathematics Program curriculum that scaffolds students in cooperative learning groups to develop their own formulas and mathematical understanding. Unlike Heyl, Hess stressed the importance of tasks including student choice and voice whereas the projects researched by Heyl were still largely structured by the curriculum alone.

    Both authors note the importance of authentic tasks that are engaging to students. Heyl directly comments, though, that the focus on student performance on state assessments has a limiting effect on the use of PBA in the classroom. Rather, math curriculum is often “presented separate from real world context” (Heyl, p.26) and learning standard algorithms and producing work similar to what is on standardized tests is the norm. She further stresses, that more research is needed in the specific area of mathematics learning with PBA’s.

    Ultimately, both underscore the need to connect learning to real world applications, underscoring the notion that rigorous learning involves student decision-making and thinking about how to apply their classroom learning to novel situations.



Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by design, not chance: Deeper thinking through actionable instruction and assessment. ASCD.


Heyl, A. (2008). Fostering Engagement for Students from Low-Socioeconomic Status Backgrounds Using Project-Based Mathematics. In Online Submission. Online Submission. Available: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED501239