A task is not a task - Empirical results about the quality of instructional tasks in higher education.

Instructional tasks play a key role in higher education in several disciplines. The paper shows empirical results of a qualitative study which analyzes quality criteria of take-home tasks out of students' (N=160) perspective. Thereby not only the task structure is regarded, but also the introduction (e.g.: how can a task be presented to students?), the performance (e.g.: what is important to consider when students do the tasks?) and the discussion (e.g.: how can the discussion of the results and the feedback look like?). In total 1.275 mentions have been analyzed. It becomes clear that the question of quality can be seen very different. Nevertheless, there are some interesting insights into students' point of view. For instance, it turned out that the layout of a task-sheet can be motivating and that practical relevance of tasks or suitable learning material play a huge role for students. Thus, the paper both contributes to focus instructional tasks in higher education more intensively from a scientific perspective and provides findings to improve teaching quality.