This module gave me a target I did not have before: the work is not better assessments for their own sake, but expert learners, students who are purposeful, strategic, and goal-directed, who know what they are working toward and why it matters. The connection I had missed is that the skills of an expert learner and the skills of a career-ready worker are the same skills, goal setting, planning, monitoring progress, and abandoning a strategy that is not working, so when I codesign an assessment with students and teach them to name a goal and move toward it, I am teaching career readiness through the structure of the assessment itself. Self-Determination Theory named why my old point-inflation approach failed, because motivation runs on autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and a heavier grade weight touches none of them. I intend to apply it by pacing the change through the design cycle, one barrier, one adjustment, one reflection, holding the North Star question in front of me: how am I impacting students? The one place I want the group's thinking is measurement, since I can design a task for autonomy and relevance but do not yet have a clean way to hear whether students actually experience it as relevant without the check collapsing into vague self-report, so I will put that back to all of you: how are you capturing student intentionality in a way that stays honest? I would rather build that answer together than pretend I have it.
