Editor’s note: Brendan Craine is a junior at the Denver School of the Arts.
In my dissection of the sorer points of Colorado education, I have tried to save the best for last. Naturally, as a student, this is my greatest woe.
Let’s be fair here – this post almost writes itself. The universal student opinion towards homework is far from secret. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that every person who reads this has, at some point, expressed dislike towards homework, even if it happened a while ago.
Before I begin bringing up any points, or dissecting anything, consider that. Homework is almost universally disliked. Mentioning it to a student (especially a high school student) is an invitation for grumbling and irritation. So why, then, do we have it at all?
I am not going to spend any time debating homework as an idea. I think that our school system is far too heavily based on a platform of grading, budgets, and statistics, and I am all too aware that removing homework is not only drastic, but probably also impossible without a complete revamping of the system. I may not like it, but I’m not going to waste any time yelling about it.
I will also not talk about homework amounts. Whether or not six hours of homework is too much is an entirely different debate. It’s assumed that third graders will do less work than high school sophomores, and that’s really the way it should be. As we advance on to more complicated subjects, it’s natural that they would require more work.
Finally, I readily admit that, as a student who has to deal with homework on a nightly basis, my opinions are far from neutral. I have no way to balance that, aside from plain open-mindedness. Hopefully, my points will still be valid.
So, if I’m going to pick apart homework, I’m going to need a working definition. So, what is homework?
It’s practice, and that’s it.
Whether you’re reading and re-reading a history text to memorize dates and figures of the French Revolution, moving equations from factored to standard form, or just repeating the same letter in cursive over and over, all you are doing is practicing. Nothing new is learned through the activity of repeating a task, aside from being able to do it more quickly and more naturally.
This is even the case with history, since while individual dates and events may change, the process of learning about and understanding history remains static. In fact, history tends to repeat itself often enough that it could be argued that the individual dates and events are irrelevant.
So, based on that, there is one problem I see with homework right off the bat: We are graded on it.
Why is that a problem? Well, homework is intended to be practice. I have no problem with the idea of working to become better at something – I already do it without prompting – but to grade on the practice doesn’t seem logical.
For instance, are Olympic athletes given scores based on how much they prepared for the event? No. And yet, that’s what homework has become, because our system demands frequent grade updates, and therefore, frequent assignments.
So, the first thing to change about homework:
Stop grading on homework. Yes, even if it’s just a completion grade. Completion grades make absolutely no sense, even in the current system. We have a 0%-100% grading scale, and a completion grade can only be one extreme or the other.
Students, however, don’t learn in absolutes. To grade me on whether or not I turned in a piece of paper with some writing on it immediately puts me on par with every single other person who did the same, even if they all got the questions correct, and I did not. The grade isn’t based on learning or understanding, and it doesn’t make sense. To continue the simile, it’s like giving every athlete a gold medal just for competing.
The natural argument here is that, once the grading is removed, so will be the incentive to do any work, since a student who did no homework and one who did all of it will receive the same grade for it – no grade at all. The only difference, of course, is that the second student will have a much more concrete understanding of the material, and is likely to do much better on any quizzes, which is why my next point is…
Replace the lost homework grades with quizzes and tests. Students take quizzes and tests very seriously. This is because with homework, the mindset is one of “students vs. teacher”, (“Ms. So-and-so gave us so much lit homework to do! Ugh!”) which tends to foster dislike and hostility towards the teacher.
This is opposed to quizzes, which have the mindset of “student vs. all the other students,” a much more productive environment, especially among teenagers, who enjoy feeling like victims. Suddenly, the teacher becomes more like an overseer, spurring the students to compete against each other. Plus, quizzes can be immensely diverse in their grading – almost as diverse as students.
The main benefit here is that a student has the freedom to regulate his or her own workload. Instead of being forced to stay up studying until 12:30 each night, I have the option to go to bed, (and be more awake and able to learn the next day), without it affecting my class grades. Because I want to do well on any quizzes, I will study as much as I can – but also as much as I feel I should.
The only person who really knows when they’ve mastered a set of dates, a mathematic method, or the themes of a novel is the person who is mastering them. This prevents more intelligent students from being stuck with what is essentially “busy work.” If they have mastered the coursework, then they can stop studying. A greater amount of control would also mean a higher level of maturity and structure in students, since it would be necessary, but not required, to organize one’s time. Making something like that a requirement makes it hard to obey, but students will make good choices on their own.
Finally, the most important point:
Homework should never be a substitute for teaching. This is very important, because there really is no substitute for good teaching. I have been in several classes where the teacher does nothing more than review the homework. That really is no good, especially in the fast-paced curriculum that most high schools have. Ideally, I’d be given an opportunity to try something, and then have it explained, and then be able to try again with my new knowledge.
Right now, only steps one and two in that process are taking place, and there isn’t time for a step three. I am aware that this is partially because of the poor student/teacher ratio, with as many as thirty-five or forty students in a single class. That’s something that needs working on, too, but not in this post.
The one problem with what I’m suggesting is that what is being taught in the classroom needs to parallel the studying that the students are doing. This would especially be an issue in a history class, since the teaching tends to be very sequential. However, if period in history were broken up into very small chunks and taught a week or three days at a time, then the students could study that chunk for any amount of time during the period when it was being taught, then take the test on it, then repeat.
Overall, the most important thing is to focus on the fact that school is meant to be about learning. As soon as learning is sacrificed for grades, structure, or just “getting through the year”, then changes need to be made.
A successful school system puts control in the hands of the students, and puts them in a position to make good decisions, or suffer the consequences of making bad decisions. The more the educational system is based around forcing students to be responsible, the more they will resist, and this is especially true with homework.
Anyway, I better call this a wrap, because I need to get on this math assignment…
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My question to you is: do third grade students have the farsightedness to respond to the incentive of doing well on a quiz or test? My experience is that the less I emphasize turning in homework, the less they turn in and the worse they do on quizzes.
Good points, Brendan. And….I agree with Ian.
Homework is often practice, but it is often the act of doing research to extend one’s thinking, to move up the ladder of higher level thinking in an independent setting.
Regarding practice, just read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” to understand the significance of practice to success. Homework, as practice in thinking, is an essential part of the function of education: “To teach one to think intensively and to think critically” (Martin Luther King, 1947).
To Ian’s point. The degree to which homework is graded depends on the age of the student.
As I explain to my 9th graders, the amount of homework that is graded will decrease as you grow older. In college, it is unlikely that you will be graded on homework. It is assumed that you are mature and goal oriented and that you understand the long-term value and consequences of doing your homework. Elementary and middle-school students see things in the short term and need immediate and frequent consequences (“grades”) for their actions. We call this “scaffolding” for success!
Margaret,
I admit, that makes a great deal of sense to me. Enough so that I am suddenly far less assured about my statements.
However, an early emphasis on long-term gratification might be worthwhile for students and the American culture at large. I don’t pretend to know anything about child psychology or teaching, but I do know that the current attitude towards grading seems slightly unhealthy in that the focus is put on the grades and not their purpose.
Ian,
I admit, this is the sort of change that would only really become effective gradually. The incentive for studying is to do well on tests, which is a form of positive reinforcement, rather than the negative reinforcement of a “0″ grade. If good tests scores are also reinforced positively, then so would be studying. How are you emphasizing homework with your third graders?
I happen mostly to agree with Brendan’s thinking on homework and have actually tried some of his recommendations. What I have found is that relying only on quiz and test scores really upsets many students.
It appears that years of schooling has left some young people with the impression that just showing up and doing some work is as or more important than actually learning something. When confronted with a failing grade on a test or a quiz, many students will explain that they did all of their work and so they should get a good grade. (I should note that this idea has rarely been expressed in the honors/accelerated classes I have taught over the years – I’ll leave that as just an observation)
At this point I either probe for understanding in a different way or go back to the body of work. In some cases it turns out the grade was the result of something other than not learning (flu has been a big one this year) and I respond accordingly (retake, alternative assessment, etc.)
Unfortunately, more often it turns out that the student really did not retain important ideas – as a math teacher I find kids not retaining stuff I know they’ve been exposed to since elementary school (how to find 6% of some number, for example).
As a teacher I understand this as a challenge to my practice that I will continue trying to learn how to address. However, the persistence of this problem over time and in different settings tells me that something is going on at the level of the whole system that we have not identified and dealt with yet.
It occurs to me that this dynamic may also have some connection to the college remediation problem also blogged about today.
Jeff,
I have experienced what you’re talking about, too, both in my peers and in myself, to a certain degree. However, that really just serves to prove my point – school should NOT be about “just doing the work” anymore than life should be about that. Starting the first eighteen years of life with that mindset cannot be healthy. Naturally, if these changes were implemented, then those of us used to a different system would experience discomfort, as is the case with any big change. I am confident that the benefits are well worth that period of awkwardness, however.
Ah, from the mouths of students.
Homework, known to educators as formative work, should not be included in a student’s grade, if the grade is to represent what a student knows and is able to do at a given moment. The grade should not reflect the practice that went into the summative assessment (also know as end of the unit exams or finals).
If a student turns in no homework and scores a 95% on the summative final, what should her grade be? Should it reflect the 0% for homework combined with the 95% final? Oh, but wait Mark, if I do not include homework in the grade then the student will not learn repsonsibility! Someone show me any iota of empirical evidence that giving a student a zero for a missing assignment teaches them repsonsibility. There is no eveidence, none, nada, zip, zero. (Read Ken O’Conner’s “How to Grade for Learning” for some more insight as to what we need to do with our current grading system.)
One way to move beyond this grade debate is to move to a true standards based grading system. Think about the impact on the college remediation. Colleges know that grades are suspect when it comes to ranking and sorting students. That’s why they use the ACT or SAT. Think about the impact on high school graduation rates if we went to a standards based grading system!
I recognize that what I am advocating for is, in the minds of some, radical. But we have to move away from what Doug Reeves calls “toxic and counterproductive grading policies.”
I appreciate the strong support, Mark!
I’m with both of you on this. I don’t think practice should be part of a final grade.
I’ve played with the idea of rolling homework completion into a “big idea” like “academic behavior” but I don’t have a way to flesh it out that I feel really gives students useful information. If such a category were to show up in a final grade, I’m afraid it would really amount to a reward for compliance with my concept of ideal student rather than for actually knowing the material. And if it doesn’t show up in a final grade, it’s one more thing I have to do with too little time. I have not cracked that nut yet.
Brendan, school should not just be about doing the work but for some, it is. As they say, teachers have to meet students where they are and help them get where they need to go. It’s fun to work with students who have a mindset like the one you describe (lots of people who became teachers have it). It can also be very rewarding to work with students with different mindsets (lots of excellent teachers thought differently about things in high school than they do now).
Mark, I usually use a grading system based on levels of understanding related to standards rather than on points. It’s funny because on this subject, I get far more push back from my honors students (in contrast to their response to not using homework in the grade as I mentioned above). I assume that’s because they’re used to and have been successful in points based systems.
However, when we use real samples and talk about what the levels of understanding mean, what they look like in student work, and what they tell me about what kids know, things change pretty quickly. If they know the what and the why, almost all of the students I’ve worked with using some version of this system have become comfortable with it (as far as I know, anyway) and some have told me they appreciate the detail of information they get. Knowing they demonstrated complete understanding of concept A but only partial understanding of concept B gives them a lot more to work with than knowing they got 80% on a test covering both.
This is interesting because I think maybe I am *using* homework differently than you are.
To wit: I use homework to figure out what I don’t understand. I suppose it’s possible for one to simply consistently have a totally incorrect method of doing something, but for the most part it seems to me that if I am doing a math problem wrong, or I am not understanding a text, I know from the homework that I need help on that thing. If I have to keep consulting my notes to remember the order that battles happen in, I know that I need to study the Civil War; if I keep getting wonky answers to a calc. problem, I know that I need to study related rates.
For me (and for many of my friends) homework is not practice so much as a diagnostic. Whatever I can’t manage on the homework, I need to ask questions about. That’s why I think classes that are just discussions of the homework are pretty awesome. That is a feature of homework that I don’t think you really touched on here.
That said, I really love the point you made about homework being teacher vs. student, and tests being students vs. students. That is super true, and also articulated really well.
Tessa,
I use homework the same way as you, but there is one fatal flaw in that system: you are graded poorly on your ignorance. That is to say, if you understand everything, then your self-diagnostic is successful and you receive a good grade, but if you do not understand everything, then it goes poorly and you receive a bad one. Thus, the grade isn’t based on the amount of work you’ve put in to learn the source material, it’s based on how readily and easily you can learn it. With this system, a student may learn everything in the course, but would receive bad marks, because they are learning what they need to learn AFTER being graded on it. With my system, the self-diagnostic remains possible, but the grade is based on the amount learned at the very end of the learning period, not during.
I strongly agree with multiple points of your argument, Brendan. I, however, would like to explain things from a different perspective on both sides of the argument.
As a teacher: I know that homework is very important (for many) to help them understand what has been taught in the classroom. Brendan, your methods, while getting to the point of why kids go to school, could be disasterous. A plain fact to face is simply that a lot of students require the incentive of an immediate grade to motivate their homework efforts. And while most high school students should have the maturity to do the homework if they need the practice, many students could read the lack of homework as a way of “just going to school. Without even the thought of learning. And while I agree that our current grading system promotes a shallow and misguided view of education, it teaches kids that they don’t have to do any work in life…especially if they are smart.
As a student: I am extremely smart, yet I have been failing (or almost failng) every class since 3rd grade…Initially because I was constantly given free rides in a school that taught me “if I was smart, I had no obligations to work.” Beyond that I have simply never learned the correct study habits and have a hard time focusing.
However, A lot of the teachers are misconstruing the way that students think. For me, school is not about going to learn, because I can’t focus on learning when all that colleges seem to care about is my grade. In fact, upon hearing a teacher assign a new project I have yet to hear anyone ask what we are going to learn, but rather how much of our grade it will be worth. And as much as I would like school to bea about learning, grades are simply more important. And for students like myself who are so far behind on latework, I no longer have the time nor patience to learn.
At the beginning of the year in my math class I was excelling in my knowledge, but because of my bad study habits easily fell behind on homework. I then had to spend so much time on homework that I was ONLY working and not learning in a (very poorly taught and structured) math class. It is now nearing the end of february, and I haven’t understood what we were talking about since october. Life for me IS ABOUT GRADES NOW. because I don’t have the time to go back and relearn everything, rather just make up my latework and take the occasional notes.
My Suggestion is that we stick with the current homework system at a younger age to help impliment the importance of being responsible, but also doing your work. Then as you progress, less and less homework is assigned to the point where in high school you can focus on learning only. (And hopefully be nothing like me)
Jovan,
Once again, I re-state that the is issues you present exist only when my suggestions are taken from the perspective of the current social views towards education and learning. Ideally, after these changes had been implemented for a few years, the values they stress would be more ingrained in the student body than they currently are. The result of this would be an overall greater stress on learning rather than grading, and things like good study habits and responsible approaches to learning would be much more a part of our society, rather than a luxury.
It’s fascinating to watch and actively be a part of the mindset shift that comes from the transition of homework in high school to homework in college. In my array of studies in a few semesters at a small, private US university, I’ve had large classes (about 35, intro to psychology) and small classes (five, Latin), and all levels of “difficulty” or “depth” of class from the introductory 100-level to the highly specialized 400-level—including courses that didn’t have a “depth” ascribed to them and independent studies.
To this end, I’ve noted that not only do the 100-level courses tend to assign more homework (in volume, not necessarily in time spent), but I also tend to get graded on the homework assignments. For my 400-level course, I just knew that I was expected to read French novels until I dropped, and retain the plot points well enough to write French literary essays on them. (Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much I would have gotten out of the class, because it was regularly so stressful and time-consuming that I ended up dropping it. But that’s a different tangent.) The 200- and 300-level tend to assign exactly what you’re suggesting: homework for practice that never gets graded. Everything has exceptions—the only homework for my Spanish 202 is to practice it enough inside and outside the classroom so that I know it for the test, for instance.
My hypothesis about this is that students are so accustomed from all their years of previous schooling and grading that they really need a structure to ease them out of that, and to accustom them to doing the homework for their own benefit. The bright ones pick this up, because in general it’s the things that they would do on their own, but some drop off the face of the classroom and fail because they’re so ill-prepared for the tests, papers, and exams. I’m guilty of knowing which classes I can slack off in when I want to socialize or sleep because the homework doesn’t get graded and the homework is a very real reinforcement—i.e., almost a verbatim copy—of what the Powerpoint in class will be the next day.
My more rewarding classes have been through my educational center (wherein each student designs their own degree and completely unique courses are taught without any “depth” designations) and through independent studies. Latin? Somewhere filed away is the entire extent of Latin grammar as presented by Wheelock and his associates, thanks to that class. My Russian and Polish independent study is fantastic because I can mold it to the way I learn languages best: I establish the grammatical framework and then build vocabulary on top of that. Soon I’ll start an independent study so that I can TEACH one of these unique courses, and one of my pedagogical notes is that very little homework will be assigned because it will be very easy for the students to make themselves look absurdly unprepared if they can’t self-motivate.
Very much a tangent, I know. Suffice to say that it slowly gets better… sort of. But patience is key, and you really have to go looking for the kind of programs that you want if you really want to take hold of your education this way in the current system.
Shiloh,
Assuming I followed this tangent correctly, this is support of the changes I suggested. In which case, thanks! Nice to hear that the language studies of which I am intensely jealous are going well.
I have two points of rebuttal on opposition to homework.
Homework, properly designed, serves the same function as basket ball practice to a basket ball player. The ability to fluently perform some skill only comes from practice. No one would want to fly with a pilot who has only read the manual, with no homework practice flying.
On the amount of homework, when I started my college degree in physics, I realized how easy I had it in high school. Even with abundant homework in high school, done at the college level work level, high school could be completed in a little over two years. I too disliked homework in high school, because I too only had elementary and middle school experiences to compare the assignments to.
The most valid objections to homework arise from poorly designed homework that does not develop skills or where the instructor fails to give constructive feedback.
Practice (homework) is unlikely to fade from successful education.
Ed,
With respect, my suggestion was not a removal of homework, but a restructuring of how it is formed. I understand the purpose it serves, and that it is necessary. The only thing I wanted removed was the grading of homework, not the homework itself.
Hi Brendan,
I appreciate your point. Unfortunately teacher, schools and school districts use a one size fits all approach to many things, including homework. In a classroom of 30 students and one teacher, some students may need the extra incentive of a grade to motivate them to do the homework, and in the one size fits all model, the teacher may have to grade or score the homework for all students just to motivate some students. While individual responsibility is desirable, and slackers suffer the consequences, teachers, schools and districts are also graded down if they let students not learn, and just suffer the consequences.
Education is messy. Nobody is perfect, not teachers, not students, not administrators and not parents. I would suggest that you communicate directly with the teacher and explore alternative credit for homework. I suspect that you won’t get very far this far into the school year with a grading system already established. If you could get all your class mates to agree to do their homework regularly . . . forget that idea because that is not going to happen either.
The only part of the homework discussion you have much control over is your own effort. In the rest of high school and college you are going to see much more homework used in lots of different ways. The only solution I see is to learn the rules of the homework game, and do your best.
Good luck and good writing.
Ed
Brendan!
So, I absolutly agree that each student should be able to decide for themselves how much to ‘practice’, because we all learn at different rates. BUT.
1. i don’t think its that important for me to learn precalc. I had a solid A in PreCalc last semester although I don’t KNOW any of it, and did not LEARN anything. You know what’s responsible for my A? Homework. Because I copied it off other people / bullshited my way through it. As someone who wants to someday be a teacher, the last sentence makes me cringe….but is it really important for ME to learn precal. I don’t even think its possible for me to learn it….and I don’t want to/ don’t need to. So why is it so important that I learn it. I do think it makes some sense that I get credit for the time I spent attempting homework. Just because I put the effort in. Because it doesn’t matter wheather I learn it or not. (this is not an argument against your point, because I agree, I’m just suggesting a radical change of the education system that does not force 17 year olds to take PreCalculus or Calculus. I think in math class we should learn to do things like manage finances and taxes and credit cards.)
2. I disagree with replacing homework with tests. Although this does accuratly decipt what each student learned a) I don’t think its important that we learn everything and b) some people just don’t do well with a testing format. I, for example, have not had a grade higher than a C in Math or Science on a test since elementrary school. I don’t know why this is, because I often UNDERSTAND all the material. Tests, especially mulitple choice tests require a specific type of thinking. This type of thinking is ‘inside the box’. Anybody who always thinks outside of the box or processes information slightly differently, can have trouble with muliple choice because suddenly a,b and d could be the correct answer depending on how abstractly the student thinks about it. You could say that students need to ‘reform’ their way of thinking and learn better test taking skills, but is getting everyone thinking inside the box and everybody thinking the SAME way not just hindering our soceity’s explorer’s and future scientists and inventors?
What if we gave highschool junior and seniors a choice of what they get graded on:
1) 30% homework 30% tests 20% classwork and 20% participation OR
2) 60% tests 20% classwork 20% participation.
The figures would vary, but that would put everything in the hand of the students.
What I think is the best idea is that each student picks say 3 subjects that colleges get to view their grades in from both senior and junior year. This way colleges could view my lit, politics and philosophy and not science and math grades, for example.
Another idea is that each student, before graduating highschool is required to take one college class they are interested in/ want to study in college. The colleges could then judge students on how successful they are in the field they are actually going to persue!
This is all a tangent, but wouldn’t you love that! Also, youmight wanna take ms.Sparks’ class next year because she grades so differently. And ms.FD’s also.
I agree strongly that with any good standards-based grading system, homework should not be graded; it should be practice. A good teacher mostly is able to monitor their formative assessments to find what students don’t know before the summative assessment. A test is a bad place to see what a student knows and doesn’t know.
First, it is really nice to see a wider-than-usual-for-this-blog variety of voices represented here.
Second, I have to agree with Ed that students have a variety of motivations. Some are so highly motivated by grades that anything less than an A feels like a personal attack. Some are all about the credentialing—let me do what I have to do to get my diploma, get out of here and get on with my life. Some enjoy learning for learning’s sake. And so on. It is difficult to come up with a single grading system that speaks to all these different and contradictory motivations, much less accounts for the idea that motivations may be mixed, or that they may change over the course of the semester.
Finally, as someone who teaches upper-division courses to college students, I have a very practical concern about homework. My “homework” consists of asking students to prepare each week for class by completing a set of readings. I am required to assign many readings (no text books, mainly articles) but I spend a lot of time thinking about how to balance the weekly work load to make it manageable and seeking out supplemental readings that I believe students will find interesting. Eventually, students will incorporate these readings into major projects such as papers. But on a week-to-week basis, when students fail to read, it is difficult to conduct a class that centers on discussing readings. So, students’ failure to complete “homework” affects the entire class experience for everyone, especially when I end up having to spend class time summarizing the basic outline of the readings. Pretty much every instructor who teaches this class struggles with the same thing, as, I am sure, have countless other college instructors. (And our readings are interesting–at least according to the students who try them! ) I have tried a variety of methods to motivate students both to complete the readings before class and to reflect upon them so that we can have better, more thoughtful discussions. A few examples..pre-class reading responses in blog form, pre-class reading questions, in-class pop quizzes, explaining to students how their failure to read affects class quality, reading summaries written and distributed by students in class, in-class reading reflections, class discussion questions that require those who did not read to go back and read certain passages…Each has worked with some students, failed with others. I am still searching for ways to address this issue. Any thoughts?
I’m totally enamored of Mark for endorsing a position on homework that has been my personal view as well. It’s in what they take away, not how they are getting there. Some people are a “fast take” and bore easily, they will “turn off” upon repetition. Others simply must keep writing the darned text down before it goes through their arm into their head. We shouldn’t punish those for whom that exercise is not necessary. I’ve never “practiced” this way as a professional. Study, review, read it a million times, sure, but never because that process itself would be considered in the result.
Anyway, Brendan, our youngest daughter solved this for her older sister when the kids were babes in elementary school: At age 5, younger sister went angrily stalking into classroom of older sister, and announced crisply to teacher that she was “giving too much homework, my sister has no time to play with me and also, I have to do her chores!!!!” Teacher did indeed soften up a bit after that, probably in abject fear of incurring wrath of youngest daughter, so if you also have a strident younger sibling you might give that a try.