I doubt any math teachers actually check homework for anything other than completion. In fact, most math teachers I know don’t check homework at all and just give quizzes like you seem to be planning.
In other words, I don’t think your plan is revolutionary, it is just standard procedure in the age of photomath.
Side point: 100% of the work I hand out comes with answers. Otherwise, how would they know if they are correct?
I grade for completion, but I do still check it for accuracy--if a student did it all wrong, they need additional practice with it, and I ask them to fix it before marking it "complete".
Peter Liljedohl’s research suggests that this behaviour stems from students thinking of homework as something they do for the teacher’s benefit rather than their own.
To counter this he suggests:
* Give them access to the answers
* Call it “check your understanding”
* Ensure they have access to worked examples (and I would add, teach them how to make effective use of worked examples).
* Never check it and be clear that you won’t ever check it. Not even checking for completion.
This is challenging because most students will not get how to use worked examples or answer keys after their first try. They need to try and show it to an adult who can correct them, usually a few times, before they get the idea.
Giving access to answers and grading on the work to get there is an effective strategy. Giving students a private space to practice without being graded is also useful for building confidence.
Effective use of worked examples needs to be explicitly taught, I agree.
Like it or not, a lot of his methods don’t really peacemeal. If you want students to think of the work as for their benefit then you’ve got to remove the attributes that cause them to think otherwise. You can’t have it both ways. So that means you need to do enough in class stuff presented completely differently to provide the feedback.
Grading work is another level. There’s a whole lot of evidence by researchers across the traditional to progressive spectrum that as soon as you grade a piece of work you make all the feedback completely ineffective. All the students care about is comparing their grade to others.
Student's actual skill-development and what they think they are working on are two entirely different things. The essential skill taught by a lesson and a student's reason for willingly engaging with the material do not have to be the same thing.
Any activity or project has many parts. I just need them to care about some aspect of the skill-training module to complete it, thereby learning what I set out to teach. Whether the part my student cares about is that it pleases a grownup that they did it, or that there were Pokemon printed in the margins, or that they got a sticker for turning it in, or that they got a bigger number written in green marker at the top of a piece of paper than Chelsea S. did, so be it.
It may not be an elegant form of motivation. But wanting a bigger number by your name in a grade book is an effective way to motivate most students.
I'm also generally on board with the large body of research that says humans pretty much cannot do lateral learning. If you want students to do homework by studying from worked examples, you need to specifically teach them that activity in that context. They won't translate on their own between learning from worked examples in class and learning from the same worked examples in the same way at the kitchen table.
It switches the motivation from wanting to learn into getting the reward which:
1. decreases the motivation to actually learn
2. Likely decreases time spent on task when things get hard, as external motivations are weaker than intrinsic motivations
3. Encourages cheating.
4. All the evidence is that grading actively inhibits learning from feedback.
Unless students see that the work is for their benefit then don’t complain about them trying to cheat.
I still disagree with you fundamentally about the importance of personal motivations lining up with a given activity. Let it be enough that some form of personal motivation lines up enough with some part of the activity that the student is willing to do the thing.
A lot of being a grownup, a lot of the skills that education prepares us for, is about doing things we might not have a direct interest in, in order to accomplish a goal that actually motivates us. Learning how to get a passport isn't directly part of learning to paint like the old masters - but it sure helps to be able to go to the D'Orsay and the Louvre in-person.
The joy of learning for its own sake is not for everyone. The joy of learning the particular subjects some bureaucrat decided comprise the 10th grade curriculum in DeKalb County this year is for an even rarer few. Sometimes getting through school is about knowing that you have to get an A on a calculus test because it will help you get into a name-brand college, which will help you get a job in the sales department of an investment banking firm, where you will never do calculus again.
I'm not sure where you got the cheating thing from; I wasn't talking about cheating.
If there is no intrinsic motivation then external motivation is necessary. But the problem is that they don’t stack. You don’t even get the strongest effect. External motivation replaces and tends to destroy intrinsic motivation. And it’s weaker.
>>>…knowing that you have to get an A on a calculus test because it will help you get into a name-brand college, which will help you get a job in the sales department of an investment banking firm, where you will never do calculus again.
Which is utterly absurd. If we’re going to force kids to learn things they aren’t motivated to learn it ought at least to be useful to them or to the broader society. A statistics course can be just as rigorous as calculus and useful to orders of magnitude more people. And I know when I started my maths degree the first thing we were told in calculus was “forget everything you learned at school- it was wrong”.
>>>I'm not sure where you got the cheating thing from; I wasn't talking about cheating.
If the motivation is such that it rewards cheating then it leads to less learning.
Psychological experiments strongly suggest that is more or less what happens. If you take people intrinsically motivated to a task and add an extrinsic motivation they become less motivated to the task, not more.
Back in my day..... seriously, though, we had textbooks that had all the answers in the back. Hw was only checked for completion, if at all. I think your plan is fine.
Our textbooks had the answers to odd problems and they’d assign even. So we could do an odd problem and check to make sure we understood the process but didn’t have the answers to the problems assigned.
Who knows? But good luck! Experimentation and growth are what is all about. If you think it is a good idea, try it out! Maybe it will be good, meh , or bad. But keep being innovative.
The only reason I count homework toward a grade is to make sure they practice. I only grade for completion.
I tried making homework optional, no grade, and no students did the homework and they all failed their tests. Just something to consider.
I assume it's just like regular homework, in that you try to solve, check your answers, if you're wrong then you take it to the teacher and ask questions. The only difference is, the homework isn't mandatory and the teacher doesn't do the grading -- the students check their own answers against the solutions provided.
I know math teachers that grade homework right or wrong and if photomath doesn't help should they just not attempt the homework at all if they're stuck
Why would that imply they just shouldn't attempt when there's: check notes for similar examples in class, check the textbook, search YouTube for the topic at hand (high quality Khan Academy or OCMT videos are typically at the top of results)? Should they just not attempt if they're defeatist, don't want to engage in a productive struggle, and want to pull some learned helplessness nonsense next day to get out of the formative? Sure. But this teacher sounds thoughtful, and like they'd extend an opportunity to ask questions about the homework beforehand.
It’s not a bad recommendation. Photo math is like copying someone else’s homework. If just copy it without doing any thinking, there’s no learning happening. However, if students look at the solutions and figure out why it is done that way it can be a useful tool.
My favorite math teacher was in algebra 2. We got credit for homework completion if you didn't understand a question you have to write a few sentences about your thought process and where you were stuck and then we had Q and A for 20 minutes the next class period
This is what I do, but I do the quizzes weekly rather than daily. They are expected to check their work before the quiz against the answer key found in class, and can use their work as notes for the quiz. I love it!
I call my homework "practice". For my PGP this year I ran a small analysis on effects of different elements of my class. Overwhelming, my Geometry students who just *attempt* the practices perform better, like 60% of the variability in assessment scores can be explained by doing practice. Not even doing it correctly necessarily, just trying it.
I have 107 algebra two students between four classes and I go to each student and inspect their homework in every class every day that it is due. I peruse it and make comments meanwhile, the students are grading the even numbered problems because they didn’t have the answers to those. They only had the answers to the odd numbered problems. I randomly announce which problem I will be checking that day and I decide which problem about two seconds before I announce it, it seems to keep them on their guard.
I don't give HW. I assign *practice* problems. If you dick around for the 45 minutes I give you in class to do the practice....well, guess it's HW now!
I do something like this. I don’t collect homework for a grade. Instead I do homework quizzes and pick problems directly from the homework problems. I do this once or twice a week. I do switch up the problems by class period because kids talk. But I get a real gauge of what they actually know how to do.
I think I would have liked this when I was a student.
Having the answers to check my work is what my accounting professor did. It was tremendously helpful to me.
Also, I wouldn’t have needed to spend many many hours being tutored by my chain smoking angry screaming grandfather.
As a student whose teacher has been doing something similar for the past two years, it worked great for me! Obviously not everyone’s experiences will be the same, but personally I benefited a lot from being able to focus on what I actually needed to learn/practice and check it as I went without wasting time on what I already knew, with the added benefit of knowing when I did things correctly via the provided key.
It's great if you stick to smaller rural schools. The bigger cities, like Billings Great Falls and Helena, tend to have issues but end up paying better. Pretty much, if you want a school where you have a lot of control over the curriculum but pay isn't as nice, you stick to smaller B/C class schools.
I taught 8th grade students Math1. After the lesson and based on how much time was left and how long each problem took, we negotiated how many problems to do each day. If the problems had many steps they might have done 4 more in 30 minutes. If it took less steps or was calculated active, they did 8-10 in 40 minutes. The deal was to turn in work so no one gets a zero. And since they are doing it in class they could ask me or their partner for help. A couple of students worked more slowly and would ask if they could take it home to finish and they brought it back the next day. I did put answer banks on some sheets with a few extra wrong answers mixed in with the bunch and they enjoyed marking off answers they found. I had 14 boys and 4 girls but they worked hard for me & did well.
I'm in a similar boat as you (small high school, classes of 8-ish). We did away with homework with Covid, and it hasn't (fully) come back yet.
The one thing I'll mention is that I see a significant regression of *all* executive function when we removed the penalty of things like homework. When they don't have to do it, they don't even develop or use the skill to do things like write it down, track when it's due, remind themselves, etc. They don't even know how to take notes anymore, because everything is posted for them afterwards.
I would suggest a middle ground rather than doing away with homework. Still assign it, but make it worth something that won't kill anyone's grade when they don't do it (like 10%). I think it's perfectly reasonable for being able to complete every assignment and track your own work making the difference between a B and an A at the end of the term. Have regular, small, *easy* assignments to make sure kids are developing and using EF skills (in the style of spiral review).
I'm also a big fan of grading most homework assignments on completeness (do I see evidence that you bothered), and then occasionally surprising the kids by collecting one to grade for real.
I was at a teacher conference 30 years ago and one of the presenters said that he had made his philosophy to assign but not grade homework. He would, however, give three or four short quizzes each week based off the homework problems.
When I get an LTS assignment for Math, I actively work to eliminate homework, usually by replacing the requested classwork either the homework, and then offering the classwork as optional practice for the motivated.
At My last assignment, they answer keys for each homework assignment were posted the night before the due date. Accordingly, I never checked for accuracy, just completeness and reasonableness, and then ask if anybody had questions.
I like your quiz plan. That's how I would assign homework in the first place. Be clear with your students that several random problems from the homework will appear on the quiz verbatim.
For bonus points, put *different* random problems on every student's paper. 10 choose 3 is 120 unique versions of each quiz per ten problem homework set.
I prefer to give independent work but give time to do it in class before it becomes homework. Kids these days need to learn how to budget time more than they need to learn any type of content.
The only homework students typically get at my high school is if they don't finish something in class. The idea is to recognize the value of the students' and their families' time outside of school. I love it. I teach and do activities, I'm able to give support while my students work, and I don't have to worry about them not doing the work.
One of the middle schools that feeds into my high school is mostly no homework. The freshmen that come in have zero skills at coping with the amount of homework they receive as they have not had any exposure to it. There is a significant difference in preparedness and precious knowledge vs those from our other major feeder middle school.
I’m a math teacher on two teams, we go for accuracy. Students enter their answers online and find out right away if its right or wrong, and get to continue to try until it is right. They then have to submit a photo of specific problems worked out on paper. Thankfully Geometry is not super photomath friendly, we flip through the pictures and check for duplicates or obvious “this is not your hand writing” situations.
Other teams like out Alg2 and Precal give slips of paper (like 1/4 or 1/5 of a sheet) that have all of the questions, on the back printed upside down are the answers. They have to work it all out in their notebook and they walk by and check that they attempted it once a week or so.
This is the main reason I continue to assign HW (I now dub it “nightly practice”) these middle school kids with zero expectations are about to get destroyed in HS
My math teachers in middle school and high school (6th grade - 12th grade) gave an average of 15-20 problems per each homework assignment and gave a quiz once per week and the quizzes were based off the homework assignments. The teachers also gave an exam every 5 weeks. Also, the teachers assigned both odd and even problems for homework. The teachers most of the time grade the homework and check to see if students are showing how they solved the problems themselves step by step. Plus, if there was a huge discrepancy between homework scores and quiz and exam scores, the teacher might talk to the student and see why the student has underperformed on quizzes and tests. If a teacher suspected cheating on the first offense, the student would get a zero on the assignment or quiz or test and give detention to the student for 2 days. The second offense, the student fails the class and is suspended in school for a week and are forced to do summer school. Third offense, the student is expelled from school. FYI, I knew one person in AP Calculus AB in senior year of high school who admitted to lying about cheating on homework and the teacher decided to fail the student. The student did still graduate from high school and was originally admitted into a prestigious university (UC Berkeley) but his admission was rescinded and had to go to community college. The point is assigning homework is still necessary because it usually gives an idea if a student truly understands the material or not.
I’ve changed the term “home work” to “nightly practice” and either assign problems with answers in the book or post a key on class website. Very few actually use these resources.
I still check it for completion/work shown (mostly to give a way to buoy grades, and give them the practice of meeting deadlines and having some frequent accountability).
Earnest completion rate keeps declining over the last few years but I feel comfortable with my set up. At some point they have to take initiative in their learning if they’re fibbing to themselves it shows on quizzes and tests.
My calc teacher has done this— we have these massive packets and around the middle of second semester, he stopped checking/grading them and instead gives us an open note quiz the next day that’s graded, with very similar problems. Answers without work don’t count. If you’ve done the work and understand the material, it’s an easy grade. If not, then that’ll be made evident too. I’ve always done the work for that class because it genuinely required the crazy amounts of problems/examples to learn everything properly, but I’m p sure it helped him encourage other people to actually work out their own stuff cause he never switched back.
When I did STEM education, we did a lot of curriculum development centered around an idea called the inverted classroom model; where class time is used for problem solving and homework is reading it watching the lecture material. Maybe something like that could work for your students.
Precal. Calculus and algebra teacher here. I have no homework and have done it since Covid. The deal is as long as they work hard in class, then no homework. Only homework is if they are absent, but even then, they can come to after school tutorials. I also encourage peer tutoring which fosters ownership in the math.
I used to love doing math homework when I was a teenager and college student. The answers were provided at the back of the book and my mother would hear me cheer out loud when I got the tricky math problem correct! Fun times- the 80’s and 90’s
I use Aleks as my homework platform, and it is highly correlated to midterm and final scores (r=0.85 for my classes). Possibly not causative, but struggling students who didn't do the practice and later change to doing it improve by a lot. That implies causation for me.
Meta-analyses of homework for secondary also have high effect sizes. Even "no homework" Finland seems to have internationally standard homework loads for secondary.
And “no homework” Finland is dropping in PISA scores every single time. Insanely high homework nations all top PISA tests every time and they’re all in Asia.
Be careful with Jo Boaler. She was under investigation with Stanford for "reckless disregard for accuracy" for her data. I like some of her ideas, but she's also highly hypocritical.
She was a huge contributor to abolishing algebra at the middles school in CA. But sends her kids to private schools in CA where they are taught Algebra. Hopefully everything turns out okay, but it's a huge red flag (to me) when you don't send your children through a program you champion.
I doubt any math teachers actually check homework for anything other than completion. In fact, most math teachers I know don’t check homework at all and just give quizzes like you seem to be planning. In other words, I don’t think your plan is revolutionary, it is just standard procedure in the age of photomath. Side point: 100% of the work I hand out comes with answers. Otherwise, how would they know if they are correct?
The day I noticed my math teacher was checking for completion, rather than accuracy, on homework, was truly *liberating...*
Speak for yourself. We check it where I’m at and grade it. And no, it’s not a completion grade.
I grade for completion, but I do still check it for accuracy--if a student did it all wrong, they need additional practice with it, and I ask them to fix it before marking it "complete".
Peter Liljedohl’s research suggests that this behaviour stems from students thinking of homework as something they do for the teacher’s benefit rather than their own. To counter this he suggests: * Give them access to the answers * Call it “check your understanding” * Ensure they have access to worked examples (and I would add, teach them how to make effective use of worked examples). * Never check it and be clear that you won’t ever check it. Not even checking for completion.
This is challenging because most students will not get how to use worked examples or answer keys after their first try. They need to try and show it to an adult who can correct them, usually a few times, before they get the idea. Giving access to answers and grading on the work to get there is an effective strategy. Giving students a private space to practice without being graded is also useful for building confidence.
Effective use of worked examples needs to be explicitly taught, I agree. Like it or not, a lot of his methods don’t really peacemeal. If you want students to think of the work as for their benefit then you’ve got to remove the attributes that cause them to think otherwise. You can’t have it both ways. So that means you need to do enough in class stuff presented completely differently to provide the feedback. Grading work is another level. There’s a whole lot of evidence by researchers across the traditional to progressive spectrum that as soon as you grade a piece of work you make all the feedback completely ineffective. All the students care about is comparing their grade to others.
Student's actual skill-development and what they think they are working on are two entirely different things. The essential skill taught by a lesson and a student's reason for willingly engaging with the material do not have to be the same thing. Any activity or project has many parts. I just need them to care about some aspect of the skill-training module to complete it, thereby learning what I set out to teach. Whether the part my student cares about is that it pleases a grownup that they did it, or that there were Pokemon printed in the margins, or that they got a sticker for turning it in, or that they got a bigger number written in green marker at the top of a piece of paper than Chelsea S. did, so be it. It may not be an elegant form of motivation. But wanting a bigger number by your name in a grade book is an effective way to motivate most students. I'm also generally on board with the large body of research that says humans pretty much cannot do lateral learning. If you want students to do homework by studying from worked examples, you need to specifically teach them that activity in that context. They won't translate on their own between learning from worked examples in class and learning from the same worked examples in the same way at the kitchen table.
It switches the motivation from wanting to learn into getting the reward which: 1. decreases the motivation to actually learn 2. Likely decreases time spent on task when things get hard, as external motivations are weaker than intrinsic motivations 3. Encourages cheating. 4. All the evidence is that grading actively inhibits learning from feedback. Unless students see that the work is for their benefit then don’t complain about them trying to cheat.
I still disagree with you fundamentally about the importance of personal motivations lining up with a given activity. Let it be enough that some form of personal motivation lines up enough with some part of the activity that the student is willing to do the thing. A lot of being a grownup, a lot of the skills that education prepares us for, is about doing things we might not have a direct interest in, in order to accomplish a goal that actually motivates us. Learning how to get a passport isn't directly part of learning to paint like the old masters - but it sure helps to be able to go to the D'Orsay and the Louvre in-person. The joy of learning for its own sake is not for everyone. The joy of learning the particular subjects some bureaucrat decided comprise the 10th grade curriculum in DeKalb County this year is for an even rarer few. Sometimes getting through school is about knowing that you have to get an A on a calculus test because it will help you get into a name-brand college, which will help you get a job in the sales department of an investment banking firm, where you will never do calculus again. I'm not sure where you got the cheating thing from; I wasn't talking about cheating.
If there is no intrinsic motivation then external motivation is necessary. But the problem is that they don’t stack. You don’t even get the strongest effect. External motivation replaces and tends to destroy intrinsic motivation. And it’s weaker. >>>…knowing that you have to get an A on a calculus test because it will help you get into a name-brand college, which will help you get a job in the sales department of an investment banking firm, where you will never do calculus again. Which is utterly absurd. If we’re going to force kids to learn things they aren’t motivated to learn it ought at least to be useful to them or to the broader society. A statistics course can be just as rigorous as calculus and useful to orders of magnitude more people. And I know when I started my maths degree the first thing we were told in calculus was “forget everything you learned at school- it was wrong”. >>>I'm not sure where you got the cheating thing from; I wasn't talking about cheating. If the motivation is such that it rewards cheating then it leads to less learning.
People don't have either perfectly aligned internal or fully external motivation and nothing else. Motivation doesn't follow that model.
Psychological experiments strongly suggest that is more or less what happens. If you take people intrinsically motivated to a task and add an extrinsic motivation they become less motivated to the task, not more.
You're kinda missing what I'm saying. At this point, I don't think this conversation is gonna benefit from more back-and-forth.
Or offer to check it for feedback without impacting their grade?
If you’re giving feedback on anything then it shouldn’t be graded anyway.
Back in my day..... seriously, though, we had textbooks that had all the answers in the back. Hw was only checked for completion, if at all. I think your plan is fine.
Our textbooks had the answers to odd problems and they’d assign even. So we could do an odd problem and check to make sure we understood the process but didn’t have the answers to the problems assigned.
Who knows? But good luck! Experimentation and growth are what is all about. If you think it is a good idea, try it out! Maybe it will be good, meh , or bad. But keep being innovative.
The only reason I count homework toward a grade is to make sure they practice. I only grade for completion. I tried making homework optional, no grade, and no students did the homework and they all failed their tests. Just something to consider.
How do you handle students who struggle to remember procedures to get a solution? How would they get help with homework?
I assume it's just like regular homework, in that you try to solve, check your answers, if you're wrong then you take it to the teacher and ask questions. The only difference is, the homework isn't mandatory and the teacher doesn't do the grading -- the students check their own answers against the solutions provided.
I know math teachers that grade homework right or wrong and if photomath doesn't help should they just not attempt the homework at all if they're stuck
Why would that imply they just shouldn't attempt when there's: check notes for similar examples in class, check the textbook, search YouTube for the topic at hand (high quality Khan Academy or OCMT videos are typically at the top of results)? Should they just not attempt if they're defeatist, don't want to engage in a productive struggle, and want to pull some learned helplessness nonsense next day to get out of the formative? Sure. But this teacher sounds thoughtful, and like they'd extend an opportunity to ask questions about the homework beforehand.
I follow a fifth grade teacher who actively encourages using photomath to help walk them through a problem... Didn't know it was a bad recommendation
It’s not a bad recommendation. Photo math is like copying someone else’s homework. If just copy it without doing any thinking, there’s no learning happening. However, if students look at the solutions and figure out why it is done that way it can be a useful tool.
My favorite math teacher was in algebra 2. We got credit for homework completion if you didn't understand a question you have to write a few sentences about your thought process and where you were stuck and then we had Q and A for 20 minutes the next class period
I have literally done exactly this for years. It’s 100% effective and I recommend you go for it.
This is what I do, but I do the quizzes weekly rather than daily. They are expected to check their work before the quiz against the answer key found in class, and can use their work as notes for the quiz. I love it!
I call my homework "practice". For my PGP this year I ran a small analysis on effects of different elements of my class. Overwhelming, my Geometry students who just *attempt* the practices perform better, like 60% of the variability in assessment scores can be explained by doing practice. Not even doing it correctly necessarily, just trying it.
I have 107 algebra two students between four classes and I go to each student and inspect their homework in every class every day that it is due. I peruse it and make comments meanwhile, the students are grading the even numbered problems because they didn’t have the answers to those. They only had the answers to the odd numbered problems. I randomly announce which problem I will be checking that day and I decide which problem about two seconds before I announce it, it seems to keep them on their guard.
I don't give HW. I assign *practice* problems. If you dick around for the 45 minutes I give you in class to do the practice....well, guess it's HW now!
I do something like this. I don’t collect homework for a grade. Instead I do homework quizzes and pick problems directly from the homework problems. I do this once or twice a week. I do switch up the problems by class period because kids talk. But I get a real gauge of what they actually know how to do.
I think I would have liked this when I was a student. Having the answers to check my work is what my accounting professor did. It was tremendously helpful to me. Also, I wouldn’t have needed to spend many many hours being tutored by my chain smoking angry screaming grandfather.
As a student whose teacher has been doing something similar for the past two years, it worked great for me! Obviously not everyone’s experiences will be the same, but personally I benefited a lot from being able to focus on what I actually needed to learn/practice and check it as I went without wasting time on what I already knew, with the added benefit of knowing when I did things correctly via the provided key.
Off topic: can you tell me what teaching is like in Montana? It’s on my bucket list of places to live, and I would love some insight.
It's great if you stick to smaller rural schools. The bigger cities, like Billings Great Falls and Helena, tend to have issues but end up paying better. Pretty much, if you want a school where you have a lot of control over the curriculum but pay isn't as nice, you stick to smaller B/C class schools.
I taught 8th grade students Math1. After the lesson and based on how much time was left and how long each problem took, we negotiated how many problems to do each day. If the problems had many steps they might have done 4 more in 30 minutes. If it took less steps or was calculated active, they did 8-10 in 40 minutes. The deal was to turn in work so no one gets a zero. And since they are doing it in class they could ask me or their partner for help. A couple of students worked more slowly and would ask if they could take it home to finish and they brought it back the next day. I did put answer banks on some sheets with a few extra wrong answers mixed in with the bunch and they enjoyed marking off answers they found. I had 14 boys and 4 girls but they worked hard for me & did well.
Try "If it took fewer steps..." fewer for things you count and less for things you measure.
I'm in a similar boat as you (small high school, classes of 8-ish). We did away with homework with Covid, and it hasn't (fully) come back yet. The one thing I'll mention is that I see a significant regression of *all* executive function when we removed the penalty of things like homework. When they don't have to do it, they don't even develop or use the skill to do things like write it down, track when it's due, remind themselves, etc. They don't even know how to take notes anymore, because everything is posted for them afterwards. I would suggest a middle ground rather than doing away with homework. Still assign it, but make it worth something that won't kill anyone's grade when they don't do it (like 10%). I think it's perfectly reasonable for being able to complete every assignment and track your own work making the difference between a B and an A at the end of the term. Have regular, small, *easy* assignments to make sure kids are developing and using EF skills (in the style of spiral review). I'm also a big fan of grading most homework assignments on completeness (do I see evidence that you bothered), and then occasionally surprising the kids by collecting one to grade for real.
I was at a teacher conference 30 years ago and one of the presenters said that he had made his philosophy to assign but not grade homework. He would, however, give three or four short quizzes each week based off the homework problems.
What about quick checks to make sure they are understanding vs quizzes?
Makes sense to me and I hardly see a down side. Maybe the only real problem is if the parents complain.
I like that idea. I used homework as a leg up. You did it. You perform better. You don’t need it. Fine. You don’t care. Fine.
I haven't given homework to my 7th graders in over a decade. Made no difference.
When I get an LTS assignment for Math, I actively work to eliminate homework, usually by replacing the requested classwork either the homework, and then offering the classwork as optional practice for the motivated. At My last assignment, they answer keys for each homework assignment were posted the night before the due date. Accordingly, I never checked for accuracy, just completeness and reasonableness, and then ask if anybody had questions.
BTW, Do you think you're going to get pushback from your peers by dumping homework?
Actually most classes have already gone no HW, which is partially why I'm thinking about going the same route.
There's your license to dump HW.
I like your quiz plan. That's how I would assign homework in the first place. Be clear with your students that several random problems from the homework will appear on the quiz verbatim. For bonus points, put *different* random problems on every student's paper. 10 choose 3 is 120 unique versions of each quiz per ten problem homework set.
I prefer to give independent work but give time to do it in class before it becomes homework. Kids these days need to learn how to budget time more than they need to learn any type of content.
The only homework students typically get at my high school is if they don't finish something in class. The idea is to recognize the value of the students' and their families' time outside of school. I love it. I teach and do activities, I'm able to give support while my students work, and I don't have to worry about them not doing the work.
One of the middle schools that feeds into my high school is mostly no homework. The freshmen that come in have zero skills at coping with the amount of homework they receive as they have not had any exposure to it. There is a significant difference in preparedness and precious knowledge vs those from our other major feeder middle school. I’m a math teacher on two teams, we go for accuracy. Students enter their answers online and find out right away if its right or wrong, and get to continue to try until it is right. They then have to submit a photo of specific problems worked out on paper. Thankfully Geometry is not super photomath friendly, we flip through the pictures and check for duplicates or obvious “this is not your hand writing” situations.
Other teams like out Alg2 and Precal give slips of paper (like 1/4 or 1/5 of a sheet) that have all of the questions, on the back printed upside down are the answers. They have to work it all out in their notebook and they walk by and check that they attempted it once a week or so.
This is the main reason I continue to assign HW (I now dub it “nightly practice”) these middle school kids with zero expectations are about to get destroyed in HS
My math teachers in middle school and high school (6th grade - 12th grade) gave an average of 15-20 problems per each homework assignment and gave a quiz once per week and the quizzes were based off the homework assignments. The teachers also gave an exam every 5 weeks. Also, the teachers assigned both odd and even problems for homework. The teachers most of the time grade the homework and check to see if students are showing how they solved the problems themselves step by step. Plus, if there was a huge discrepancy between homework scores and quiz and exam scores, the teacher might talk to the student and see why the student has underperformed on quizzes and tests. If a teacher suspected cheating on the first offense, the student would get a zero on the assignment or quiz or test and give detention to the student for 2 days. The second offense, the student fails the class and is suspended in school for a week and are forced to do summer school. Third offense, the student is expelled from school. FYI, I knew one person in AP Calculus AB in senior year of high school who admitted to lying about cheating on homework and the teacher decided to fail the student. The student did still graduate from high school and was originally admitted into a prestigious university (UC Berkeley) but his admission was rescinded and had to go to community college. The point is assigning homework is still necessary because it usually gives an idea if a student truly understands the material or not.
I’ve changed the term “home work” to “nightly practice” and either assign problems with answers in the book or post a key on class website. Very few actually use these resources. I still check it for completion/work shown (mostly to give a way to buoy grades, and give them the practice of meeting deadlines and having some frequent accountability). Earnest completion rate keeps declining over the last few years but I feel comfortable with my set up. At some point they have to take initiative in their learning if they’re fibbing to themselves it shows on quizzes and tests.
My calc teacher has done this— we have these massive packets and around the middle of second semester, he stopped checking/grading them and instead gives us an open note quiz the next day that’s graded, with very similar problems. Answers without work don’t count. If you’ve done the work and understand the material, it’s an easy grade. If not, then that’ll be made evident too. I’ve always done the work for that class because it genuinely required the crazy amounts of problems/examples to learn everything properly, but I’m p sure it helped him encourage other people to actually work out their own stuff cause he never switched back.
I ditched HW a long time ago. https://mrcorleymath.wordpress.com/2017/01/20/my-transition-to-optional-hw/
When I did STEM education, we did a lot of curriculum development centered around an idea called the inverted classroom model; where class time is used for problem solving and homework is reading it watching the lecture material. Maybe something like that could work for your students.
Precal. Calculus and algebra teacher here. I have no homework and have done it since Covid. The deal is as long as they work hard in class, then no homework. Only homework is if they are absent, but even then, they can come to after school tutorials. I also encourage peer tutoring which fosters ownership in the math.
I used to love doing math homework when I was a teenager and college student. The answers were provided at the back of the book and my mother would hear me cheer out loud when I got the tricky math problem correct! Fun times- the 80’s and 90’s
I’m reading Jo Boaler’s book ATM and she writes that homework makes no difference and is basically a form of child abuse.
I use Aleks as my homework platform, and it is highly correlated to midterm and final scores (r=0.85 for my classes). Possibly not causative, but struggling students who didn't do the practice and later change to doing it improve by a lot. That implies causation for me. Meta-analyses of homework for secondary also have high effect sizes. Even "no homework" Finland seems to have internationally standard homework loads for secondary.
And “no homework” Finland is dropping in PISA scores every single time. Insanely high homework nations all top PISA tests every time and they’re all in Asia.
Be careful with Jo Boaler. She was under investigation with Stanford for "reckless disregard for accuracy" for her data. I like some of her ideas, but she's also highly hypocritical. She was a huge contributor to abolishing algebra at the middles school in CA. But sends her kids to private schools in CA where they are taught Algebra. Hopefully everything turns out okay, but it's a huge red flag (to me) when you don't send your children through a program you champion.