What is academic rigor in the classroom?
Academic Rigor refers to a certain standard of excellence that professors and administrators expect of their students. These standards are made sometimes made clear to students through examples, instruction and rubrics. Sometimes these standards are less defined.
What are examples of rigor in the classroom?
Several common classroom tasks are inherently rigorous, including reading idea-dense literature, taking notes, and using the writing process itself, but these are rarely engaging, and don’t always fit with a given academic standard or task.
What is academic rigor and why is it so important?

Rigor is more than just “how difficult a class is” however, and even more than “how hard a student has to work to earn a good grade.” In essence, a rigorous class prepares the student by teaching them (and having them exercise) skills useful in school, the business world, and in life.
How do you ensure academic rigor?
Academic rigor requires students to take critical thinking to new levels. To encourage academic rigor in the classroom, teachers must establish high expectations and then provide ways for students to meet them. The best teachers coordinate learning to produce expected outcomes.
How do you assess academic rigor?
The three indicators for rigor are: thoughtful work, high-level questioning, and academic discussion. Student Learning • Students demonstrate their learning by completing recall and retell tasks. Most tasks draw on memorization and focus on answering recall-type questions.

How can I improve my academic rigor?
5 Strategies to Increase Rigor and Engagement
- Use Questions to Hook ’em Early.
- Challenge Students After Reading with Discussion Questions.
- Ask Students to Compare Videos & Texts.
- Do Cross-Textual Analysis with Paired Texts.
- Many Texts, Same Topic.
What does rigorous learning look like in a classroom?
A New Understanding of Rigor Our perspective is simple: True rigor is creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels (Blackburn, 2008).
How do you maintain academic rigor?
Why is rigorous education important?
Relevance helps students see the value of what they’re learning and rigor ensures they are challenged to develop advanced skills and knowledge. Rigor and relevance are also important for equity, because they ensure that all students have access and entry points to high-level content and skills.
What does rigorous learning look like in your classroom?
For each of the three components: increasing expectations, providing support, and demonstrating understanding, we’ve provided examples of a characteristic. The foundation of a rigorous classroom lies with high expectations for students.
What is level of rigor?
An assessment with an appropriate level of rigor measures a range of student thinking and understanding so that it measures what all students know and can do. If assessments are too easy, some students may not have the opportunity to demonstrate the upper bounds of what they know and can do.
Why is a lesson rigorous?
Rigorous teaching and learning involves setting high expectations while maintaining a balance among the complexity of the learning content (texts, concepts, etc.), cognitive engagement with that content (learning tasks), and a teacher’s ability to make the content or tasks accessible to every student.
Setting the Standard. We all know that there is a certain standard of excellence that we implicitly expect of our students.
What is academic rigor, what do we do with it?
Academic rigor is also about the level of opportunity we give students to take their learning beyond what we do in the classroom. We want a curriculum where children not only learn how to do math and physics problems on paper, they learn how to apply that knowledge to real-world challenges.
What does the word rigor mean in education?
The term “rigor” in education has been a buzzword for at least a decade. It describes the result of work that challenges students’ thinking in new and interesting ways. Promoting rigor in the classroom requires expectations and experiences that are academically, intellectually, and personally challenging.
What does it mean to be academically rigorous?
What does it mean to be academically rigorous? It means that students are challenged to think, perform, and grow to a level that they were not at previously. It means that students must work, like an athlete at a team practice, to build their skills, understanding, and thinking power so that they can achieve at higher and higher levels.