Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Where does homework fit in?
As I'm easing back into the groove of teaching I find myself taking a critical look at grading. More specifically with homework. It seems that more and more emphasis is being put on test scores as opposed to homework. Now that we are using standards based grading I find myself in a bit of a grey area when it comes to using homework as merely formative assessment which is ungraded, versus actual assessment of the given standard. Penny for all your thoughts?
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I think you bring up a very good point. I think that will be debate that will be becoming more present with teaching and learning in the near future. With online learning and testing out on standards, students may be given credit for courses however without having to do much "physical" work. I am not sure where I stand with this, as I do hesitate to not have students learn the value of completing tasks by doing homework. Interesting discussion... It will be interesting how district choose to address this approaching issue...
ReplyDeleteI hope this is at least a penny's worth!
ReplyDeleteI think that if you are doing standards based grading, it would be difficult for you to include homework as part of their grade. Generally, most homework would probably fall under the "formative" category rather than "summative." If it's a big project in which they have had practice on the concepts prior to the project, it could be used as summative (and be included in their grade).
My PLC is battling this idea as well. It seems like it will be hard for students to do homework without the incentive that it will count towards their grade. I know that I'd never do homework that wasn't included in the grade, even if it was made obvious that it would help me on a test (at their age anyway).
Make the connection between assessment and homework very obvious and students may develop intrinsic motivation to complete it.
GOOD LUCK!
Mr. Hills,
DeleteYou make a good point. I think the ideal is to build intrinsic motivation. I think it would have to be a collaborative front by all teachers to create such an environment. I will do my best this quarter and let you know how it goes. I also agree with your homework assement views. I think in the right context they can be used towards standards based grading. I'll keep you posted on how things go.
I also think intrinsic motivation is the key, here. As a PLC, we talked about not giving points for homework at all and only giving homework quizzes. Our fear, however, was that 7th graders would not be able to connect that doing homework is part of the learning process and therefore going to affect their grade in class. At what point can students put this together?
DeleteI also want to comment on Ben's post. I agree with him when he says the only way to make students stop thinking of homework in terms of points is to uniformly stop grading it. The more we give out points for homework, the more students will be motivated extrinsically. If we give out no points, their only reason to do it would be to learn and succeed in class. But how do we go about doing this? And again, at what maturity level will students be able to see this connection?
I agree with you, Megan. At what maturity level can students see this connection? I'm teaching 3rd grade this year, where basically they are just really getting into homework routines in math. I'm trying to drill home that this is for practice, and we correct it all together as a class. I'm not giving them points for 100% correct answers or anything, but I'm telling them it affects their grade for having their homework completed. How will it affect their grade though, besides it helping them perform better on assessments? This is a hard concept for students to understand. Doing your homework will help you do better on tests, but yes, it needs to be an intrinsic motivation.
DeleteYou bring up a really great question and it's certainly one that my PLC is dealing with.
ReplyDeleteIf students are preparing for a summative assessment, I think it is helpful for students to earn a grade on homework/formative assessments. In English, for example, we are planning to have students do a practice paragraph write and are going to grade it using the same rubric that we'll use for the summative. This way students are extra familiar with the rubric and with what they need to work on before the final assessment. I understand that we could do this without counting the grade or using comments only, but I think it's clearer to students and parents (particularly those who check TIES frequently) to grade these assessments.
I am interested to see what this year will bring for my students. I will be working with some of our kids who struggle the most, both with the actual homework (because it is hard for them) and with the motivation to do the work (because they don't want to do it, or try it, or fail it). Motivating these students to do the work is going to be tricky if they even begin to think that homework "doesn't count!"
ReplyDeleteThis is also something I am hoping to work out with my PLC. One of the breakout sessions I went to at the PLC Institute was about homework. The presenter was emphatic that homework should not be graded on the same level as a summative assessment. Her viewpoint was that students are still getting comfortable with the material, and that it should certainly be an ungraded, formative assessment. I am curious to see how that fits in with the viewpoints of my PLC.
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Delete(moved my comment here because I didn't want it only as a subtopic to Erin's; did not reread or change the wording, so it still might be crappy)
ReplyDeleteIf we grade homework that assesses students' knowledge at an incomplete point in the learning cycle and report it in our grades, we can't be confident the final grade reflects what a student knows when he/she leaves our class. Is it fair to the student that gets a 60% on the homework/formative assessment and then really works hard to get up to a 70% when we tell him/her that his/her grade is still a D because of that grade taken while we were fine tuning our understanding? What about the opposite case?
I've seen plenty of kids that do zero homework even when it's worth 20% of their grade. I've seen others that do assignments that aren't even collected. It seems like the same kids do homework no matter what; the kids that value learning. It also seems like if we think that students only do homework for points and percents, the only way we can teach them to value homework is to uniformly stop grading it. If we recognize that students have developed this behavior in relation to homework because of what we've done to them, we can't be timid about fixing the problem.
I think I'm trying to convey that you wouldn't have those worries at your grade level if students had never gotten in the habit of thinking about homework in the wrong way. If we think that's true, then we can't bend to their will and let their previous experiences tell us we have to slowly change. If we do that, it'll never happen. If we adopt a uniform policy and leave it in place for 5 years, it might.
One of the biggest parts of many learning objective based grading schemes is the use behavior centered grades. This is where schools report refusal to do homework, attendance, etc. While it's important, I can't imagine what would happen to the first school that decided to report a separate grade on those factors. I think parents would be furious that their students were getting low grades based on non-academic factors and students in competing (for college etc) districts were not.
More to say, but out of time.
As an elementary physical education teacher, I don't give out a lot of homework, however in 4th and 5th grade we do give one cognitive test a quarter, and it's hard for me to give a C or a D on this test, since we only give one per quarter. I would love to give more, but since we only see our students 16 times in a quarter, it gets hard to spend time on giving a test when we have so much to teach with skills. I guess the point I am trying to make is, how do we make it fair to give out on test and let that count for their entire cognitive grade? If the student fails the test, we usually let them retake it, but sometimes they still get a B which brings their overall grade down. IT's hard to find a balance between affective, cognitive and pyscomotor when specialists don't have the chance to see the students every single day.
ReplyDeleteBen-loved reading your post. Very well explained and I find myself this year agreeing with a lot of what you said. Question for you specifically-what grading policy/system do you currently use?
ReplyDeleteWhat an engaging conversation! This year I am attempting my hand at SBG....with only having labs and summative assessments count towards the grade. The formative assessments or activities are entered into gradebook but with "adjusted points" (it's worth 0 but they get a 1-4). I'm excited to see how it works. I'm excited that students are still doing all of the work they need to in order to be successful on the test. I tell them that all of our work we do in class helps support what they are expected to know on the exam, the standards under which they are evaluated. It's only been a week so I'm excited to see how it goes throughout the semester!
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ReplyDeleteSo this isn't directly related to grading but is definitely related to homework...
ReplyDeleteI generally don't give more than one homework assignment per week. That would be my max. But am I doing students a disservice by not establishing the precedent of homework (as in, work done outside of class time)?
It was suggested by a colleague that students will struggle in high school and college if I don't establish the routine of homework.
I like what Ben had to say. I feel like, at least now, our own district is moving towards evaluating ("grading") us as teachers in terms of our progress along a continuum of growth. I'm certainly not a master teacher, but I can say with confidence that I have made great gains since last year (my first year). The district would be doing me a disservice if they evaluated me this year like they did last year because I know that I'm further along than I once was. I feel like grading homework is similar. Homework is meant to be practice. They do the work, make mistakes, then (hopefully) learn from those mistakes. When it is time to be assessed, now show me what you know based on what you've learned (especially what you've learned from your previous mistakes). I think that shows actual learning.
ReplyDeleteIn the junior high FACS classes, we have weighted our grades. "Practice" is one of the categories and counts only for 15% of their grade. We only grade the practice homework when they have had the time in class to work on mastery. Also, in the FACS world, we add in the clause to students that we have the right if they are not completing their homework to hold them out of labs or other luxuries. The idea is to get across if they work hard and do their homework and practice, they will be able to have the rewards of learning the material. I've told them I can't let them cook if we are practicing a certain technique if they haven't shown that they have practiced or learned the material. That seems to work pretty well, although it is not totatlly intrinsically motivated, it helps students want to complete the work...with the hope that it will carry over into wanting to do their homework, graded or not, in other classes because they see the rewards and successes of doing so.
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