Assignment Choice and Learning: Identifying Leadership Behaviors

Students in higher education institutions come from a range of backgrounds with differing home, educational, and life experiences. Institutions and faculty within them must create inclusive teaching and learning environments to enable all students to succeed. A guiding framework to support this aspiration is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which benefits all students, not only those with formally documented learning accommodations. This study examined the effectiveness of a reflection assignment in an online undergraduate leadership theory and application course. The course utilizes UDL principles to provide students with options for illustrating their understanding of course concepts. The study examined student preferences for the options provided and analyzed the reflections through the lens of a leadership behavior taxonomy to determine which types of leader behaviors students found most salient. The findings indicate that when presented with choice, students predominantly represented their learning with an artifact, suggesting a preference for an accessible form of assignment rather than a more abstract or digital form of representation. In terms of leadership behaviors, students focused primarily on relationship-oriented followed by task-oriented with change-oriented and external behaviors much less represented. This finding suggests that students chose to reflect on leader behaviors with which they have had the most experience.