how should homework be graded

Scoring & Grading Practices

Introduction*.

Assigning students grades is an important component of teaching, and many school districts issue progress reports, interim reports, or midterm grades as well as final semester grades. Traditionally, these reports were printed on paper and sent home with students or mailed to students’ homes. Increasingly, school districts are using web-based grade management systems that allow parents to access their child’s grades on each assessment and the progress reports and final grades.

Grading can be frustrating for teachers as there are many factors to consider. In addition, report cards typically summarize in brief format a variety of assessments and so cannot provide much information about students’ strengths and weaknesses. This means that report cards focus more on assessment of learning than assessment for learning. Several decisions must be made when assigning students’ grades, and schools often have detailed policies that teachers must follow. In this chapter, we consider major questions associated with grading.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to

• Define the purpose of grading;
• Identify classroom-level grading practices that align with purpose;
• Implement researched-based grading & reporting practices;
• Analyze the effectiveness of traditional grading practices to report student learning fully.

Purpose of Grading

Beginning with an understanding of purpose is key to developing effective grading practices. Susan Brookhart has written a lot about grading practices and encourages educators to focus first on determining what they believe about the purpose of grading. In “ Starting the Conversation about Grading ” (2011), Brookhart asserted:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that getting sidetracked with details of scaling (letters, percentages, or rubrics? Zeros or not? No Ds or Fs?) or policies (What should we do with late or missing work? How can we report behavior? What will we do about academic honors and awards?) before you tackle the question of what a grade means in the first place will lead to trouble . Logic, my own experience, and the research and practice of others (Cox & Olsen, 2009; Guskey & Bailey, 2010; McMunn, Schenck, & McColskey, 2003) all scream that this is the case.

Grading scales and reporting policies can be discussed productively once you agree on the main purpose of grades. For example, if a school decides that academic grades should reflect achievement only, then teachers need to handle missed work in some other way than assigning an F or a zero. Once a school staff gets to this point, there are plenty of resources they can use to work out the details (see Brookhart, 2011; O’Connor, 2009). The important thing is to examine beliefs and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of grades first . Without a clear sense of what grading reform is trying to accomplish, not much will happen.

Take some time to reflect on what you believe a grade should represent. Consider how the school districts below define the purpose of grading in their grading philosophy and compare it to a district you work in or are familiar with.

• Glenpool School District Grading Philosophy (OK)
• West Des Moines Community Schools Grading Philosophy   (IA)

According to Brookhart, it is essential that educators first answer the question, “What is the purpose of a grade?” before deciding on grading practices within their classroom. Once a teacher defines their purpose, they should then check to make sure their purpose aligns with the school’s grading policy. A good supporting question when defining the purpose of a grade might be, “Is your purpose as a teacher to select talent, or is it to develop talent?” The answer will define not only how you approach grading but probably most aspects of your teaching practice.

According to Guskey (2015), researchers found that teachers and school leaders identify six common purposes for grades:

• Communicate information about student learning to parents;
• Provide information to students for self-reflection;
• Select, identify, or group students;
• Incentivize students to learn;
• Evaluate the quality of instruction; and
• Provide evidence of a student’s lack of effort.

No single grading instrument can accurately report all six of the aspects above to the fullest extent. Therefore, in an attempt to make their grading system more transparent and consistent, some schools have done the hard work of clarifying their purpose for grading. In the next section, we will explore a particular approach to grading with a specific purpose that seems to be a growing trend in schools across the country.

Reflection Questions

Accuracy Question: Do the grades I report accurately reflect my students’ true level of understanding?

Confidence Question: Do my grading practices contribute to student confidence or do they raise anxiety?

(Schimmer, 2016)

Adopting a Standards-Based Mindset

Many school districts have started looking for ways to make their grading practices more transparent. One of the biggest trends you will find in the literature is the idea of standards-based grading, sometimes also referred to as standards-referenced, criterion-referenced, or mastery grading. There are various forms of this idea being implemented and tested. As a novice educator, you should be aware of this concept as you may end up in a district that uses a version of this grading philosophy, or you may find that certain aspects may align strongly with your philosophy and choose to integrate them into your future grading practices at the classroom level.

School districts that shift their grading practices to a standards-based approach have a clearly defined purpose for what grades represent. Educational experts contend that in a standards-based grading mindset, the purpose of grading is to report where a student is in relation to a specific learning target (Brookhart, 2009; Dueck, 2014; Guskey, 2015; Popham, 2017; Schimmer, 2016). In adopting this belief, student effort, participation, past attempts, attendance, behavior, punctuality, etc. are not a factor in the final grade but are reported separately. This belief that grades should reflect student mastery or understanding of specific standards only contrasts with traditional grading practices that often factor in non-academic skills and dispositions. For an example, consider reading how Adam Dyche , Social Studies Dept. Chair at Waubonsie Valley High School defines a Standards-Based Mindset .

“The standards-based mindset is not about establishing flawless formulas, but rather a way for teachers to THINK as they examine the evidence of learning students produce” (Schimmer, 2016, p.61).

Common Grading Practices

Take some time to reflect on the problems identified in the article Why It’s Crucial – And Really Hard – To Talk About More Equitable Grading to see how different grading practices can not only present misleading information to students and parents, but also undermine a clear purpose of grading.

Defining the purpose of grading is only effective if the practices used to determine students’ grades support the stated purpose. According to Guskey (2015), most teachers agree that grades should reflect how well students have demonstrated mastery of the established learning goals. Still, teachers use a variety of criteria to determine grades that often don’t align with that purpose. By not reflecting on grading practices, a teacher may inadvertently assign scores to students in a manner that does not align with their beliefs about what that grade should represent. Traditional methods of calculating grades include weighted averages, averaging, and total points earned. The key takeaway here is not that every teacher should assume the same grading procedures but that all teachers should take a moment to reflect on how their grading practices align with either the school’s or their purpose of grading statement.

The best way to align grading practices with purpose is through sound assessment practices. The problem is that too often, we as teachers adopt grading practices that do not align with effective assessment practices (Schimmer, 2016). Some commonly used grading practices may be in direct opposition to assigning a grade that reports student mastery of learning objectives, including averaging scores, assigning zeros, giving extra credit, and assessing penalties for behavior (Guskey, 2015; Schimmer, 2016; Dueck, 2014). The problem with these grading practices is that they distort the ability of the grade to accurately report student understanding of the learning objectives. Next, we will present some questions you can ask yourself when you begin to set up your grading policies and discuss some potential strengths and weaknesses of common approaches.

How are various assignments and assessments weighted?*

Students typically complete various assignments during a grading period, such as homework, quizzes, performance assessments, etc. Teachers have to decide—preferably before the grading period begins—how each assignment will be weighted. For example, a sixth-grade math teacher may decide to weight the grades in the following manner:

Deciding how to weight assignments should be done carefully as it communicates to students and parents what teachers believe is important, and also may be used to decide how much effort students will exert (e.g. “If homework is only worth 5 percent, it is not worth completing twice a week”). Notice in the presentation below how your choices in how many points to assign a particular assignment may impact the final grade calculation.

Read or Listen to Jennifer Gonzalez’s blog post, How Accurate Are Your Grades? Gonzalez presents questions teachers should consider when planning how their grading process will work in their classroom.

Should scores be averaged to calculate the final grade?

How we think about learning influences how we grade, and our actions (grading) show our students what we value about learning. One teacher action that a common grading practice is to average scores to tabulate a final grade. When averaging grades, teachers calculate the sum of all points earned during a grading period and divide that sum by the total number of points possible. This process determines the mean, or average, which can be reported as a percentage or letter grade (i.e., C- may be equivalent to 70%). The problem with averaging scores to determine grades is that it may not accurately describe current levels of student understanding. Consider the example of two students in Figure 1. Student 1 completed all homework assignments (HW) for full credit but showed limited understanding on quizzes (Qz) and tests. Student 2 did not complete assigned homework but demonstrated sufficient understanding on quizzes and tests. Critics of using the averaging approach would argue that averaging the scores for these students does not provide an accurate representation of their current level of understanding.

Should zeros or penalties be assigned for missing and late work?

In the previous example (Figure 1), Student 2 was assigned zeros for missing work. This practice of assigning zeros is similar to assigning penalties to student work based on behavioral issues such as late submission. Penalties decrease the accuracy of our grading and are not proven to increase student interest or effort (Schimmer, 2016). Especially when using a 100-point grading scale, using zeros unproportionally pulls a student’s grade down. Similarly, penalties are used to encourage things like timeliness, but that is not reported during the grading process, only the lower score, which, after being penalized, now reflects a lower degree of understanding.

Should homework scores be included in the final grade calculation?

To give homework or to not give homework? This question has been debated and researched with mixed results. John Hattie’s work looking at the effect size of homework on student learning suggests that overall, homework has a small to modest effect on student learning. However, there seems to be a greater effect for students as they age (HS > MS > Elem), and that homework seems most impactful when it is short, focused on material students are ready for, and when students have input. In the end, the question may not be whether you should give homework, but what you should do with it once students complete it.

In a classroom using traditional grading practices, homework typically accounts for a significant portion of the final grade. Even if the homework is a small percentage of the final grade, it is a form of summative assessment. In a standards-based classroom, homework is often viewed as practice and an opportunity to receive feedback without a score or for a very small score. In other words, using homework as a formative assessment.

A common concern teachers have is that if homework is not graded, students will not do it. Schimmer (2016) argues that adopting the mindset of, “if I don’t grade it, they won’t do it” suggests that students have no interest in learning and reduces school to an exercise of accumulating points. Another disadvantage of including homework in the final grade calculation is that it can distort the final grade due to factors such as cheating, confusion, unreadiness, and factors outside of the student’s control.

Should social skills or effort be included?*

• Read an article by Douglas Reeves, Lee Ann Jung, and Ken O’Connor (2017) for an overview of four common grading practices that may do more harm than good .
• Read what Joe Feldman says about What Traditional Classroom Grading Gets Wrong .
• Rick Wormeli writes a lot about grading practices. See what he identifies as Grading Malpractice .
• Ken O’Connor’s 15 Fixes for Grading

Elementary school teachers are more likely than middle or high school teachers to include some social skills in report cards (Popham, 2005). These may be included as separate criteria in the report card or weighted into the grade for that subject. For example, the grade for mathematics may include an assessment of group cooperation or self-regulation during mathematics lessons. Some schools and teachers endorse including social skills in the grading process, arguing that developing such skills is important for young students and that students need to learn to work with others and manage their behaviors to be successful. Others believe that grades in subject areas should be based on cognitive performances—and that if assessments of social skills are made, they should be separated from the subject grade on the report card. Clear criteria, such as those contained in analytical scoring rubrics, should be used if social skills are graded.

Teachers often find it difficult to decide whether effort and improvement should be included as a component of grades. One approach is for teachers to ask students to submit drafts of an assignment and make improvements based on the feedback they receive. The grade for the assignment may include some combination of the score for the drafts, the final version, and the amount of improvement the students made based on the feedback provided.

A more controversial approach is basing grades on effort when students try really hard day after day but still cannot complete their assignments well. These students could have identified special needs or be recent immigrants that have limited English skills. Some school districts have guidelines for handling such cases. One disadvantage of using improvement as a component of grades is that the most competent students in the class may do very well initially and have little room for improvement—unless teachers are skilled at providing additional assignments that will help challenge these students.

Teachers often use “hodgepodge grading,” i.e. a combination of achievement, effort, growth, attitude or class conduct, homework, and class participation. A survey of over 8,500 middle and high school students in the US state of Virginia supported the hodgepodge practices commonly used by their teachers (Cross & Frary, 1999).

Should grades be calculated on a curve?*

Two options are commonly used: absolute grading and relative grading. In absolute grading, grades are assigned based on criteria the teacher has devised. If an English teacher has established a level of proficiency needed to obtain an A and no student meets that level, then no A’s will be given. Alternatively, if every student meets the established level, then all the students will get A’s (Popham, 2005). Absolute grading systems may use letter grades or pass/fail.

In relative grading, the teacher ranks students’ performances from worst to best (or best to worst); those at the top get high grades, those in the middle moderate grades, and those at the bottom low. This is often described as “grading on the curve” and can be useful to compensate for an examination or assignment that students find much easier or harder than the teacher expected.

However, relative grading can be unfair to students because the comparisons are typically within one class, so an A in one class may not represent the level of performance of an A in another class. Relative grading systems may discourage students from helping each other improve as students compete for limited rewards. Bishop (1999) argues that grading on the curve gives students a personal interest in persuading each other not to study as a serious student makes it more difficult for others to get good grades.

What kinds of grade descriptions should be used?*

Traditionally, a letter grade system is used (e.g. A, B, C, D, F ) for each subject. The advantages of these grade descriptions are they are convenient, simple, and can be averaged easily. However, they do not indicate what objectives the student has or has not met or students’ specific strengths and weaknesses (Linn & Miller 2005). Elementary schools often use a pass-fail (or satisfactory-unsatisfactory) system, and some high schools and colleges do as well. Pass-fail systems in high school and college allow students to explore new areas and take risks on subjects that they may have limited preparation for or is not part of their major (Linn & Miller 2005). While a pass-fail system is easy to use, it offers even less information about students’ level of learning.

A pass-fail system is also used in classes taught under a mastery-learning approach in which students are expected to demonstrate mastery of all the objectives to receive course credit. Under these conditions, it is clear that a pass means that the student has demonstrated mastery of all the objectives.

Some schools have implemented a checklist of the objectives in subject areas to replace the traditional letter grade system. Students are rated on each objective using descriptors such as Proficient, Partially Proficient, and Needs Improvement. For example, the checklist for students in a fourth-grade class in California may include the four types of writing that are required by the English language state content standards

• writing narratives
• writing responses to literature
• writing information reports
• writing summaries

The advantages of this approach are that it communicates students’ strengths and weaknesses clearly, and it reminds the students and parents of the objectives of the school. However, if too many objectives are included, the lists can become so long that they are difficult to understand.

Grading In PE (or skills-based classrooms)

If you are currently teaching, or plan to teach in a heavily skills-based content area (i.e., physical education, art, music, world language, etc.), then you may be thinking that this grading discussion doesn’t pertain to you. If that is the case, then you should check out Joey Feith ’s blog titled Meaningful Grades in Physical Education . The emphasis is on PE, but the ideas and practices could easily be applied to other skill-based content areas and traditional classroom settings.

Grading Practices to Consider

There may be no perfect answer to the problem of assigning student grades. However, there are a few practices that you might consider making a part of your grading policy if your goal is for your grades to accurately depict student achievement of learning objectives.

Identify Standards to Assess

The first place you should start is by identifying specific learning targets for your grading period. The best way to fight grade inflation (or deflation) is through clearly defined standards and quality assessments that align with those standards (Guskey, 2015; Heff, 2019). Similar to writing learning objectives for your daily lessons and assignments, identify the main objectives that you plan to summatively assess for the semester up front. From there, you can track student progress throughout the semester. You might also consider having your students track their progress, see how Dan Meyer used a concept checklist in his math classes.

Use a 4 Point Scale

Consider switching from the traditional 100-point grading scale to a 4-point scale. According to Guskey (2015), a four-point scale provides a smaller number of grading categories, which will result in a more reliable score of student learning. In the traditional 100-point scale, each grade category has a 10-point spread (ex. C 70-79). In addition, there are 60 levels of failure (0-59) and only 40 levels of passing (60-100). This creates an imbalance in the final grade calculation. The 4-point model removes this issue by assigning each grade level a single-point spread (0-F, 1-D, 2-C, 3-B, 4-A).

A 4-point scale is familiar to students as it reflects the GPA format and can be converted to a percentage score for grade reporting. Schimmer (2016) suggests that 4-point scores could be averaged at the end of the grading cycle and converted to a traditional grading scale. For example, averages between 3.25 and 4.0 would equate to an A, 2.50 to 3.24 equal a B, 1.75 to 2.49 equal a C, and 1.00 to 1.74 equal a D. Some schools have even suggested reviewing all of the scores for student learning and considering the median and mode scores rather relying solely on the average score. For example, see how Bremerton Schools outlines how student grades will be calculated using a 4-point scale .

Remove Grade Distortion

The potential for grade distortion when applying penalties and zeroes to students’ grades has been addressed earlier in the chapter. Removing these practices from your grading may help your final grades more accurately reflect student understanding. A similar practice is offering extra credit. When extra credit is added to a student’s score, the grade may or may not reflect the student’s current level of understanding. For example, suppose a student was to earn extra credit points for bringing items to class, attending an event, or completing some task that is not directly aligned with the objective(s) of the assessment. In that case, the additional points earned distort the grade. An alternative to offering extra credit to improve a score would be to allow students to revise their work without penalty. Reassessment is a key component of ensuring that your grades reflect the current level of understanding of your students. Consider adjusting scores to reflect current understanding after students have revised work or completed alternative assessments. For example, see how North Jr High allows students to retest and revise assessments (slides 10 & 11). Also, consider Guskey’s (2023) defense for how reassessment is supported by research in his article, Giving Retakes Their Best Chance to Improve Learning . Lastly, consider the strategies suggested for limiting the number of retake opportunities in the article, How Many Retakes Should Students Get?

Examples of Standards-Based Grading Approaches in Different Content Areas

• Math-Dan Meyer
• Math-Dane Ehlert
• Social Studies

Discussion Questions

• Do grades motivate learning? Why or why not?
• What does a grade represent? What does it tell us about a student? What does it not tell us?
• If I get an A and you get a C, is that “fair”? Does it need to be? Is that a reasonable expectation in a classroom?
• What are some potential problems with the traditional A–F grading system in a classroom? What are the benefits?
• What are some potential pedagogical benefits of removing grades from a classroom? Are there potential downsides? How could we avoid those issues?
• How have grades affected your approach to learning in the past?
• Think of a time when grading helped you improve. What was helpful about it specifically? Why has it stuck with you?
• Think of a time when grading has impacted you negatively. How did it impact you? How did it affect your approach going forward? Why has it stuck with you?

Discussion Questions  by Liz Delf, Rob Drummond, and Kristy Kelly are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

There are many things to consider before entering your classroom for the first time, and how you grade your students should be one area that you give some considerable thought. You probably won’t have your perfect grading policy figured out the first time. However, you should begin by asking yourself, what is the purpose of grades in my classroom? From there, you can review any policies your district might have and ensure that your thoughts about grading align with your district. Regardless, you should take the time to think through how your grading policies will encourage students to engage in the learning process and how your final reporting will reflect student learning.

Extend Your Learning

• I strongly recommend Dueck’s book, Grading Smarter Not Harder . It is an easy read and has a lot of great ideas and resources for use in the classroom.
• If you are interested in hearing more about Dueck’s ideas, consider watching his webinar . I think this might be a great conversation starter with other teachers.
• If Rick Wormeli’s ideas interest you, then you can find numerous videos online where he discusses these ideas in greater detail. If you start with his video on Redo’s, Retakes, and Do-Overs , then you can follow the trail to other videos. Or, google “Rick Wormeli grading videos” and you can pick based on your interest.
• If you are teaching or plan to teach math, then you should check out Dan Meyer’s The Comprehensive Math Assessment Resource . The ideas presented here could easily be translated into any content area, so don’t shy away just because it is math related.
• Can’t get enough? Check out these Suggested Readings

Summarizing Key Understandings

References & attribution.

Attribution: Sections noted with “*” were adapted in part from  Ch. 15 Teacher made assessment strategies by Kevin Seifert and Rosemary Sutton, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Brookhart, S. M. (2009). Grading (2nd ed.). New York: Merrill.

Dueck, M. (2014). Grading smarter not harder. ASCD

Guskey, T. R. (2015). On your mark: Challenging the conventions of grading and reporting. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press

Popham, J. W. (2017). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (8th ed.). New York: Pearson

Schimmer, T. (2016). Grading from the inside out: Bringing accuracy to student assessment through standards-based mindset. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press

Teaching Methods & Practices Copyright © by Jason Proctor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Does homework really work?

by: Leslie Crawford | Updated: December 12, 2023

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You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain? Is this just too much homework?

However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.

But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in their 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?

Homework haterz

Whether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”

Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?

Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework , The Homework Myth , and The Case Against Homework the film Race to Nowhere , and the anguished parent essay “ My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me ” make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.

One Canadian couple took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all homework.

So what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?

How much is too much?

To answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting and examining hundreds of studies. Chris Drew Ph.D., founder and editor at The Helpful Professor recently compiled multiple statistics revealing the folly of today’s after-school busy work. Does any of the data he listed below ring true for you?

• 45 percent of parents think homework is too easy for their child, primarily because it is geared to the lowest standard under the Common Core State Standards .

• 74 percent of students say homework is a source of stress , defined as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

• Students in high-performing high schools spend an average of 3.1 hours a night on homework , even though 1 to 2 hours is the optimal duration, according to a peer-reviewed study .

Not included in the list above is the fact many kids have to abandon activities they love — like sports and clubs — because homework deprives them of the needed time to enjoy themselves with other pursuits.

Conversely, The Helpful Professor does list a few pros of homework, noting it teaches discipline and time management, and helps parents know what’s being taught in the class.

The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is listed on the National Education Association’s website and the National Parent Teacher Association’s website , but few schools follow this rule.

Do you think your child is doing excessive homework? Harris Cooper Ph.D., author of a meta-study on homework , recommends talking with the teacher. “Often there is a miscommunication about the goals of homework assignments,” he says. “What appears to be problematic for kids, why they are doing an assignment, can be cleared up with a conversation.” Also, Cooper suggests taking a careful look at how your child is doing the assignments. It may seem like they’re taking two hours, but maybe your child is wandering off frequently to get a snack or getting distracted.

Less is often more

If your child is dutifully doing their work but still burning the midnight oil, it’s worth intervening to make sure your child gets enough sleep. A 2012 study of 535 high school students found that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body development.

For elementary school-age children, Cooper’s research at Duke University shows there is no measurable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, Cooper found there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, Cooper’s research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

Many schools are starting to act on this research. A Florida superintendent abolished homework in her 42,000 student district, replacing it with 20 minutes of nightly reading. She attributed her decision to “ solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students .”

More family time

A 2020 survey by Crayola Experience reports 82 percent of children complain they don’t have enough quality time with their parents. Homework deserves much of the blame. “Kids should have a chance to just be kids and do things they enjoy, particularly after spending six hours a day in school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth . “It’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.”

By far, the best replacement for homework — for both parents and children — is bonding, relaxing time together.

Homes Nearby

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How families of color can fight for fair discipline in school

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Credit: August de Richelieu

Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in

Joyce epstein, co-director of the center on school, family, and community partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong.

By Vicky Hallett

The necessity of homework has been a subject of debate since at least as far back as the 1890s, according to Joyce L. Epstein , co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. "It's always been the case that parents, kids—and sometimes teachers, too—wonder if this is just busy work," Epstein says.

But after decades of researching how to improve schools, the professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education remains certain that homework is essential—as long as the teachers have done their homework, too. The National Network of Partnership Schools , which she founded in 1995 to advise schools and districts on ways to improve comprehensive programs of family engagement, has developed hundreds of improved homework ideas through its Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program. For an English class, a student might interview a parent on popular hairstyles from their youth and write about the differences between then and now. Or for science class, a family could identify forms of matter over the dinner table, labeling foods as liquids or solids. These innovative and interactive assignments not only reinforce concepts from the classroom but also foster creativity, spark discussions, and boost student motivation.

"We're not trying to eliminate homework procedures, but expand and enrich them," says Epstein, who is packing this research into a forthcoming book on the purposes and designs of homework. In the meantime, the Hub couldn't wait to ask her some questions:

What kind of homework training do teachers typically get?

Future teachers and administrators really have little formal training on how to design homework before they assign it. This means that most just repeat what their teachers did, or they follow textbook suggestions at the end of units. For example, future teachers are well prepared to teach reading and literacy skills at each grade level, and they continue to learn to improve their teaching of reading in ongoing in-service education. By contrast, most receive little or no training on the purposes and designs of homework in reading or other subjects. It is really important for future teachers to receive systematic training to understand that they have the power, opportunity, and obligation to design homework with a purpose.

Why do students need more interactive homework?

If homework assignments are always the same—10 math problems, six sentences with spelling words—homework can get boring and some kids just stop doing their assignments, especially in the middle and high school years. When we've asked teachers what's the best homework you've ever had or designed, invariably we hear examples of talking with a parent or grandparent or peer to share ideas. To be clear, parents should never be asked to "teach" seventh grade science or any other subject. Rather, teachers set up the homework assignments so that the student is in charge. It's always the student's homework. But a good activity can engage parents in a fun, collaborative way. Our data show that with "good" assignments, more kids finish their work, more kids interact with a family partner, and more parents say, "I learned what's happening in the curriculum." It all works around what the youngsters are learning.

Is family engagement really that important?

At Hopkins, I am part of the Center for Social Organization of Schools , a research center that studies how to improve many aspects of education to help all students do their best in school. One thing my colleagues and I realized was that we needed to look deeply into family and community engagement. There were so few references to this topic when we started that we had to build the field of study. When children go to school, their families "attend" with them whether a teacher can "see" the parents or not. So, family engagement is ever-present in the life of a school.

My daughter's elementary school doesn't assign homework until third grade. What's your take on "no homework" policies?

There are some parents, writers, and commentators who have argued against homework, especially for very young children. They suggest that children should have time to play after school. This, of course is true, but many kindergarten kids are excited to have homework like their older siblings. If they give homework, most teachers of young children make assignments very short—often following an informal rule of 10 minutes per grade level. "No homework" does not guarantee that all students will spend their free time in productive and imaginative play.

Some researchers and critics have consistently misinterpreted research findings. They have argued that homework should be assigned only at the high school level where data point to a strong connection of doing assignments with higher student achievement . However, as we discussed, some students stop doing homework. This leads, statistically, to results showing that doing homework or spending more minutes on homework is linked to higher student achievement. If slow or struggling students are not doing their assignments, they contribute to—or cause—this "result."

Teachers need to design homework that even struggling students want to do because it is interesting. Just about all students at any age level react positively to good assignments and will tell you so.

Did COVID change how schools and parents view homework?

Within 24 hours of the day school doors closed in March 2020, just about every school and district in the country figured out that teachers had to talk to and work with students' parents. This was not the same as homeschooling—teachers were still working hard to provide daily lessons. But if a child was learning at home in the living room, parents were more aware of what they were doing in school. One of the silver linings of COVID was that teachers reported that they gained a better understanding of their students' families. We collected wonderfully creative examples of activities from members of the National Network of Partnership Schools. I'm thinking of one art activity where every child talked with a parent about something that made their family unique. Then they drew their finding on a snowflake and returned it to share in class. In math, students talked with a parent about something the family liked so much that they could represent it 100 times. Conversations about schoolwork at home was the point.

How did you create so many homework activities via the Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork program?

We had several projects with educators to help them design interactive assignments, not just "do the next three examples on page 38." Teachers worked in teams to create TIPS activities, and then we turned their work into a standard TIPS format in math, reading/language arts, and science for grades K-8. Any teacher can use or adapt our prototypes to match their curricula.

Overall, we know that if future teachers and practicing educators were prepared to design homework assignments to meet specific purposes—including but not limited to interactive activities—more students would benefit from the important experience of doing their homework. And more parents would, indeed, be partners in education.

Posted in Voices+Opinion

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Center for Teaching

Grading student work.

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What Purposes Do Grades Serve?

Developing grading criteria, making grading more efficient, providing meaningful feedback to students.

• Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-Sectioned Courses

Minimizing Student Complaints about Grading

Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson identify the multiple roles that grades serve:

• as an  evaluation of student work;
• as a  means of communicating to students, parents, graduate schools, professional schools, and future employers about a student’s  performance in college and potential for further success;
• as a  source of motivation to students for continued learning and improvement;
• as a  means of organizing a lesson, a unit, or a semester in that grades mark transitions in a course and bring closure to it.

Additionally, grading provides students with feedback on their own learning , clarifying for them what they understand, what they don’t understand, and where they can improve. Grading also provides feedback to instructors on their students’ learning , information that can inform future teaching decisions.

Why is grading often a challenge? Because grades are used as evaluations of student work, it’s important that grades accurately reflect the quality of student work and that student work is graded fairly. Grading with accuracy and fairness can take a lot of time, which is often in short supply for college instructors. Students who aren’t satisfied with their grades can sometimes protest their grades in ways that cause headaches for instructors. Also, some instructors find that their students’ focus or even their own focus on assigning numbers to student work gets in the way of promoting actual learning.

Given all that grades do and represent, it’s no surprise that they are a source of anxiety for students and that grading is often a stressful process for instructors.

Incorporating the strategies below will not eliminate the stress of grading for instructors, but it will decrease that stress and make the process of grading seem less arbitrary — to instructors and students alike.

Source: Walvoord, B. & V. Anderson (1998).  Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.

• Consider the different kinds of work you’ll ask students to do for your course.  This work might include: quizzes, examinations, lab reports, essays, class participation, and oral presentations.
• For the work that’s most significant to you and/or will carry the most weight, identify what’s most important to you.  Is it clarity? Creativity? Rigor? Thoroughness? Precision? Demonstration of knowledge? Critical inquiry?
• Transform the characteristics you’ve identified into grading criteria for the work most significant to you, distinguishing excellent work (A-level) from very good (B-level), fair to good (C-level), poor (D-level), and unacceptable work.

Developing criteria may seem like a lot of work, but having clear criteria can

• save time in the grading process
• make that process more consistent and fair
• communicate your expectations to students
• help you to decide what and how to teach
• help students understand how their work is graded

Sample criteria are available via the following link.

• Analytic Rubrics from the CFT’s September 2010 Virtual Brownbag
• Create assignments that have clear goals and criteria for assessment.  The better students understand what you’re asking them to do the more likely they’ll do it!
• letter grades with pluses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.)
• 100-point numerical scale (for exams, certain types of projects, etc.)
• check +, check, check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.)
• pass-fail or credit-no-credit (for preparatory work)
• Limit your comments or notations to those your students can use for further learning or improvement.
• Spend more time on guiding students in the process of doing work than on grading it.
• For each significant assignment, establish a grading schedule and stick to it.

Light Grading – Bear in mind that not every piece of student work may need your full attention. Sometimes it’s sufficient to grade student work on a simplified scale (minus / check / check-plus or even zero points / one point) to motivate them to engage in the work you want them to do. In particular, if you have students do some small assignment before class, you might not need to give them much feedback on that assignment if you’re going to discuss it in class.

Multiple-Choice Questions – These are easy to grade but can be challenging to write. Look for common student misconceptions and misunderstandings you can use to construct answer choices for your multiple-choice questions, perhaps by looking for patterns in student responses to past open-ended questions. And while multiple-choice questions are great for assessing recall of factual information, they can also work well to assess conceptual understanding and applications.

Test Corrections – Giving students points back for test corrections motivates them to learn from their mistakes, which can be critical in a course in which the material on one test is important for understanding material later in the term. Moreover, test corrections can actually save time grading, since grading the test the first time requires less feedback to students and grading the corrections often goes quickly because the student responses are mostly correct.

Spreadsheets – Many instructors use spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) to keep track of student grades. A spreadsheet program can automate most or all of the calculations you might need to perform to compute student grades. A grading spreadsheet can also reveal informative patterns in student grades. To learn a few tips and tricks for using Excel as a gradebook take a look at this sample Excel gradebook .

• Use your comments to teach rather than to justify your grade, focusing on what you’d most like students to address in future work.
• Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an assignment.
• Comment primarily on patterns — representative strengths and weaknesses.
• Avoid over-commenting or “picking apart” students’ work.
• In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students rather than provide answers for them.

Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-sectioned Courses (for course heads)

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to teaching assistants, graders, and students in your course.
• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your teaching assistants and graders.
• Encourage teaching assistants and graders to share grading concerns and questions with you.
• have teaching assistants grade assignments for students not in their section or lab to curb favoritism (N.B. this strategy puts the emphasis on the evaluative, rather than the teaching, function of grading);
• have each section of an exam graded by only one teaching assistant or grader to ensure consistency across the board;
• have teaching assistants and graders grade student work at the same time in the same place so they can compare their grades on certain sections and arrive at consensus.
• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus.
• Avoid modifying your policies, including those on late work, once you’ve communicated them to students.
• Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.
• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focusing rather on course learning goals.

For a comprehensive look at grading, see the chapter “Grading Practices” from Barbara Gross Davis’s  Tools for Teaching.

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Making Homework Central to Learning

Three Reasons Teachers Continue to Grade Homework

"if i don't grade it, they won't do it.", "hard work should be rewarded.", "homework grades help students who test poorly.", what to do instead, practice 1. evaluate each assignment to determine whether to grade it., practice 2. tie homework to assessments., practice 3. focus on demonstration of learning, not task completion..

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U.S. teachers lead the world in their predilection for grading homework. In a study of educational practices in 50 countries, almost 70 percent of U.S. teachers said that they used homework assignments to calculate student grades, compared with 20 percent of teachers in Canada, 14 percent in Japan, and 9 percent in Singapore (Baker & LeTendre, 2005). It's worthwhile to ask whether the hours spent scoring student homework and calculating it into grades pay off. This study said no; in fact, it found a negative correlation between grading homework and increased achievement:Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships, the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in the frequency, total amount, and percentage of teachers who used homework in grading are all negative ! (pp. 127–128)

Even though teachers at Glenn Westlake Middle School in Lombard, Illinois, no longer count homework in students' grades, students still understand that homework must be done, teachers still document which work has been completed and when, and teachers still give learners feedback about their homework. Explaining this fact to parents was a big part of the transition. Glenn Westlake's principal, Phil Wieczorek, met with parent groups several times:The parents had a lot of misconceptions. We had to explain to them this did not mean there was not going to be homework. Homework would still be looked at, kept track of, and given feedback. It just wasn't going to be averaged into the student's grade.

Schools that still wish to grade some homework should separate homework into formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments, such as practice with math problems, spelling, or vocabulary, should not be factored into the overall course grade. Summative assessments, such as research papers or portfolios of student work, may be. Many district policies outline these differences in their grading and homework policies, such as this guideline from the Rockwood School District in Eureka, Missouri:Homework is an important part of teaching, learning, and parent involvement in the Rockwood School District. Student work should always receive feedback to further student learning. Teachers will exclude homework from the course grade if it was assigned for pre-assessment or early learning guided practice. Homework assigned as a summative assessment may be included in the course grade based on curriculum guidelines.

The easiest way to tie homework to assessments in students' minds is to allow them to use homework assignments and notes when taking a test. Another method is to correlate the amount of homework completed with test scores. One teacher does this by writing two numbers at the top of each test or quiz—the student's test score and the student's number of missing homework assignments. This not only helps the students see the connection, but also shows the teacher which students are not benefiting from a specific homework task and which students may know the content so well that they don't need to do homework. Patricia Scriffiny (2008), a teacher at Montrose High School in Colorado, makes the connection explicit:When I assign homework, I discuss with my students where and how it applies to their assessments… Some students don't do all of the homework that I assign, but they know that they are accountable for mastering the standard connected to it. (p. 72)

Figure 1. Sample Monthly Feedback Form for English 11

Making Homework Central to Learning- table

Baker, D. P., & LeTendre, G. K. (2005). National differences, global similarities: World culture and the future of schooling . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Cushman, K. (2010). Fires in the mind: What kids can tell us about motivation and mastery . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

O'Connor, K. (2009). How to grade for learning K–12 . (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

O'Donnell, H. (2010, October 8). Grading for learning: Dealing with the student who "won't work" (Revisited) [blog post]. Retrieved from The Thoughtful Teacher at http://repairman.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/grading-for-learning-dealing-with-the-student-who-wont-work-revisited .

Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us . New York: Riverhead Books.

Scriffiny, P. L. (2008). Seven reasons for standards-based grading. Educational Leadership, 66 (2), 70–74.

Vatterott, C. (2009). Rethinking homework: Best practices that support diverse needs . Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Cathy Vatterott is professor emeritus of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Referred to as the "homework lady," Vatterott has been researching, writing, and speaking about K–12 homework for more than 20 years.

She frequently presents at a variety of state and national educational conferences and also serves as a consultant and workshop presenter for K–12 schools on a variety of topics.

She serves on the Parents magazine advisory board and is author of two ASCD books: Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs, 2nd edition (2018) and Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards Based Learning   (2015).

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

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Study: Homework Doesn’t Mean Better Grades, But Maybe Better Standardized Test Scores

Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at UVA's Curry School of Education

The time students spend on math and science homework doesn’t necessarily mean better grades, but it could lead to better performance on standardized tests, a new study finds.

“When Is Homework Worth The Time?” was recently published by lead investigator Adam Maltese, assistant professor of science education at Indiana University, and co-authors Robert H. Tai, associate professor of science education at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education , and Xitao Fan, dean of education at the University of Macau. Maltese is a Curry alumnus, and Fan is a former Curry faculty member.

The authors examined survey and transcript data of more than 18,000 10th-grade students to uncover explanations for academic performance. The data focused on individual classes, examining student outcomes through the transcripts from two nationwide samples collected in 1990 and 2002 by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Contrary to much published research, a regression analysis of time spent on homework and the final class grade found no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not. But the analysis found a positive association between student performance on standardized tests and the time they spent on homework.

“Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be,” Maltese said.

Tai said that homework assignments cannot replace good teaching.

“I believe that this finding is the end result of a chain of unfortunate educational decisions, beginning with the content coverage requirements that push too much information into too little time to learn it in the classroom,” Tai said. “The overflow typically results in more homework assignments. However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them.

“The results from this study imply that homework should be purposeful,” he added, “and that the purpose must be understood by both the teacher and the students.”

The authors suggest that factors such as class participation and attendance may mitigate the association of homework to stronger grade performance. They also indicate the types of homework assignments typically given may work better toward standardized test preparation than for retaining knowledge of class material.

Maltese said the genesis for the study was a concern about whether a traditional and ubiquitous educational practice, such as homework, is associated with students achieving at a higher level in math and science. Many media reports about education compare U.S. students unfavorably to high-achieving math and science students from across the world. The 2007 documentary film “Two Million Minutes” compared two Indiana students to students in India and China, taking particular note of how much more time the Indian and Chinese students spent on studying or completing homework.

“We’re not trying to say that all homework is bad,” Maltese said. “It’s expected that students are going to do homework. This is more of an argument that it should be quality over quantity. So in math, rather than doing the same types of problems over and over again, maybe it should involve having students analyze new types of problems or data. In science, maybe the students should write concept summaries instead of just reading a chapter and answering the questions at the end.”

This issue is particularly relevant given that the time spent on homework reported by most students translates into the equivalent of 100 to 180 50-minute class periods of extra learning time each year.

The authors conclude that given current policy initiatives to improve science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education, more evaluation is needed about how to use homework time more effectively. They suggest more research be done on the form and function of homework assignments.

“In today’s current educational environment, with all the activities taking up children’s time both in school and out of school, the purpose of each homework assignment must be clear and targeted,” Tai said. “With homework, more is not better.”

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Article Information

November 20, 2012

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Designing and Assessing Homework

The goal of Proficiency-Based Learning Simplified is to ensure that students acquire the most essential knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in school, higher education, the modern workplace, and adult life. Therefore, systems of assessment and verifying proficiency should prioritize enduring knowledge and skills—i.e., graduation standards and related performance indicators.

In a proficiency-based system, homework—i.e., assignments completed largely outside of the classroom and without direct support and supervision from teachers—should be instructionally purposeful and connected to clearly defined learning standards. The Great Schools Partnership recommends that teachers consider the following general guidelines when assigning homework in a proficiency-based l earning environment:

• All homework assignments should be relevant, educationally purposeful, and driven by clearly defined learning objectives for a unit or lesson.
• Students should be given an equal and equitable opportunity to complete all homework assignments. Given that some home situations may complicate a student’s ability to complete an outside-of-class assignment—such as households that have no computers or internet connection—schools and teachers need to ensure that every student has access to all necessary materials, technologies, and resources regardless of their socioeconomic status, language ability, disability, or home situation.
• The failure to complete or turn-in homework on time should not affect a student’s academic score unless the work being done outside of class is part of a larger summative assessment.
• The failure to complete or turn-in homework on time may be reflected in a student’s habits-of-work grade.
• Students should be given additional opportunities to improve, complete, and resubmit homework as an additional demonstration opportunity when reasonable and appropriate. If the assignment is part of a larger summative assessment, the improved scores should be counted, not earlier scores or a combination of scores.
• Teachers should provide feedback in a timely fashion so that students know how well they performed before they take the next assessment.
• The purpose of all homework assignments should be clearly articulated to and understood by students; specifically, students should know what learning objectives and performance indicators the assignment addresses, and what criteria will be used if the homework assignment is going to be assessed.
• Students should know in advance if a homework assignment is going to be assessed, and whether the assignment will be a formative assessment or a graded part of a larger summative assessment.
• To the extent possible, homework should be differentiated for students, which includes, when appropriate, student-designed learning tasks and projects that allow them to demonstrate proficiency in ways that engage their personal interests, ambitions, and learning needs.

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Student Opinion

Should We Get Rid of Homework?

Some educators are pushing to get rid of homework. Would that be a good thing?

By Jeremy Engle and Michael Gonchar

Do you like doing homework? Do you think it has benefited you educationally?

Has homework ever helped you practice a difficult skill — in math, for example — until you mastered it? Has it helped you learn new concepts in history or science? Has it helped to teach you life skills, such as independence and responsibility? Or, have you had a more negative experience with homework? Does it stress you out, numb your brain from busywork or actually make you fall behind in your classes?

Should we get rid of homework?

In “ The Movement to End Homework Is Wrong, ” published in July, the Times Opinion writer Jay Caspian Kang argues that homework may be imperfect, but it still serves an important purpose in school. The essay begins:

Do students really need to do their homework? As a parent and a former teacher, I have been pondering this question for quite a long time. The teacher side of me can acknowledge that there were assignments I gave out to my students that probably had little to no academic value. But I also imagine that some of my students never would have done their basic reading if they hadn’t been trained to complete expected assignments, which would have made the task of teaching an English class nearly impossible. As a parent, I would rather my daughter not get stuck doing the sort of pointless homework I would occasionally assign, but I also think there’s a lot of value in saying, “Hey, a lot of work you’re going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?” I certainly am not the only person wondering about the value of homework. Recently, the sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco and the mathematics education scholars Ilana Horn and Grace Chen published a paper, “ You Need to Be More Responsible: The Myth of Meritocracy and Teachers’ Accounts of Homework Inequalities .” They argued that while there’s some evidence that homework might help students learn, it also exacerbates inequalities and reinforces what they call the “meritocratic” narrative that says kids who do well in school do so because of “individual competence, effort and responsibility.” The authors believe this meritocratic narrative is a myth and that homework — math homework in particular — further entrenches the myth in the minds of teachers and their students. Calarco, Horn and Chen write, “Research has highlighted inequalities in students’ homework production and linked those inequalities to differences in students’ home lives and in the support students’ families can provide.”

Mr. Kang argues:

But there’s a defense of homework that doesn’t really have much to do with class mobility, equality or any sense of reinforcing the notion of meritocracy. It’s one that became quite clear to me when I was a teacher: Kids need to learn how to practice things. Homework, in many cases, is the only ritualized thing they have to do every day. Even if we could perfectly equalize opportunity in school and empower all students not to be encumbered by the weight of their socioeconomic status or ethnicity, I’m not sure what good it would do if the kids didn’t know how to do something relentlessly, over and over again, until they perfected it. Most teachers know that type of progress is very difficult to achieve inside the classroom, regardless of a student’s background, which is why, I imagine, Calarco, Horn and Chen found that most teachers weren’t thinking in a structural inequalities frame. Holistic ideas of education, in which learning is emphasized and students can explore concepts and ideas, are largely for the types of kids who don’t need to worry about class mobility. A defense of rote practice through homework might seem revanchist at this moment, but if we truly believe that schools should teach children lessons that fall outside the meritocracy, I can’t think of one that matters more than the simple satisfaction of mastering something that you were once bad at. That takes homework and the acknowledgment that sometimes a student can get a question wrong and, with proper instruction, eventually get it right.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

Should we get rid of homework? Why, or why not?

Is homework an outdated, ineffective or counterproductive tool for learning? Do you agree with the authors of the paper that homework is harmful and worsens inequalities that exist between students’ home circumstances?

Or do you agree with Mr. Kang that homework still has real educational value?

When you get home after school, how much homework will you do? Do you think the amount is appropriate, too much or too little? Is homework, including the projects and writing assignments you do at home, an important part of your learning experience? Or, in your opinion, is it not a good use of time? Explain.

In these letters to the editor , one reader makes a distinction between elementary school and high school:

Homework’s value is unclear for younger students. But by high school and college, homework is absolutely essential for any student who wishes to excel. There simply isn’t time to digest Dostoyevsky if you only ever read him in class.

What do you think? How much does grade level matter when discussing the value of homework?

Is there a way to make homework more effective?

If you were a teacher, would you assign homework? What kind of assignments would you give and why?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Jeremy Engle joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2018 after spending more than 20 years as a classroom humanities and documentary-making teacher, professional developer and curriculum designer working with students and teachers across the country. More about Jeremy Engle

What’s the value of homework and should it be graded?

These two questions have been debated many times, often with little resolution.  Many schools leave it up to individual faculty members, a grade-level team or department to determine its own policy.  I wonder why schools tend to relinquish the responsibility for setting a homework policy that is based on guidelines consistent with what research says about student learning.  As a former science teacher, department chair, director of studies, and principal, I think schools angst over setting policies that impact the day-to-day teaching practice of a classroom teacher.  Unlike some other professions, we give teachers a fair amount of autonomy, especially in independent schools.

I will not argue in this post that we should remove autonomy completely.  A great deal of creative teaching emerges when schools trust teachers and give them the autonomy to experiment with different methods.  However, I will argue that setting homework guidelines is an important responsibility that schools should not ignore because it assures that someone will use the research as a filter to guide how the school manages homework.  I believe a reasonable and fair set of homework policies can positively impact a student’s school experience.

Here are some ways in which a school with no policies in place impact students:

• one teacher at the same grade level or in the same course grades homework another teacher does not
• one teacher at the same grade level or in the same course reviews homework another teacher does not
• one teacher at the same grade level or in the same course uses homework as a formative process while another teacher does not
• one teacher at the same grade level or in the same course has students correct and redo homework as a learning exercise while another teacher does not

These are only four scenarios that could lead to a learning environment for students where the playing field is not level.  Students want to believe that regardless of which teachers’ classroom they are in their experience and chance for success will rest solely on their performance not on whether teachers have different policies for how to manage homework.

In her book, Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs
 , Cathy Vatterot discusses the homework dilemma and lays out an argument for constructing a program that meets the diverse needs of students.  In her mind, the “best homework” has five attributes:

homework should have a specific academic purpose, such as practice, checking for understanding, or applying knowledge or skills. homework should be used to efficiently demonstrate student learning. homework should promote student owner ship of learning by offering choices and being personally relevant. homework should be designed to instill a sense of competence in the student so he or she can succeed. homework should be a worthy and pleasing experience and not merely a routine or drill to be completed

In addition to her five attributes, I would propose the following set of parameters that a good homework policy should have:

• homework should be given only if the teacher is prepared to give students feedback on their performance.
• homework should be formatively assessed which means that it should: (1) inform the teacher as to whether his or her teaching has been effective; and (2) inform the student if he or she has learned the material.
• homework should be a component of the student’s overall achievement (grade) because if it is meaningful and the student is engaged with it and if it is formatively assessed then it is a good indicator of student performance.
• homework should have two purposes; (1) assessing student understanding (Vatterot’s #1 above); and (2) preparing the student for future learning.  It should propel the student along the learning curve the teacher intends through the learning experience.

MET Life Foundation conducted one of the most exhaustive surveys,  The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: The Homework Experience , of its kind on homework practices and attitudes in the US.  It surveyed 1,200 K-12 public school teachers, 500 parents, and 2,000 students in 2007.  Here is a snapshot of what they uncovered in their survey.

Homework occupies an intersection between school, home and the community, and, as such, can serve as a channel of communication between the school and parent, as well as the parent and child. Over 80% of parents believe that their child’s teachers assign the right amount of – or even too little – homework 75% of students report that they have enough time to do their assignments. 90% of parents report that helping their child with homework provides an opportunity for them to talk and spend time together. The majority of parents do not see homework as getting in the way of family time or as a major source of stress and disagreement in their family. The 25% of students who report that they do not have enough time have higher rates of risk factors related to student achievement and other areas. Those who lack enough time for their homework are more likely to get low grades and are less likely to plan to go to college. Frequent failure to complete homework may be an early signal of student disengagement that can lead to school-related problems. The majority of parents, students, and teachers believe in the value of homework. They think homework is important and helps students learn more in school. Parents who do not believe homework is important appear to be more alienated and less connected to their child’s school. Overall, most parents (and teachers) report that the quality of homework assigned by their school is less than excellent. 33% of parents rate the quality of homework assignments as fair or poor, and 40% believe that a great deal or some homework is busywork and not related to what students are learning in school. 50% of parents have a rule for their child that homework should be completed in a quiet place. Yet 75% of students agree that it is important to have a quiet place to do homework, this is not necessarily a goal that they put into practice. Among secondary school students, 90% are usually doing other activities, or “multi-tasking”, while doing their homework, including 70% who listen to music and 51% who watch TV. 50% of teachers frequently use homework to help students practice skills, prepare for tests, develop good work habits, develop their critical thinking skills, and motivate them to learn. Teachers also use homework as part of assessment and, less frequently, because they did not have enough time during class to cover all of the material; these usages are more common among secondary school teachers than elementary school teachers. Highly experienced teachers (21+ years of experience) are more likely than new teachers (5 years or less experience) to believe that homework is important: that it helps students learn more in school or that it helps students reach their goals for after high school. New teachers are less likely than highly experienced teachers to provide students with feedback on homework or to review completed assignments during class discussions. New teachers feel less prepared to create engaging homework assignments.

There are many implications from the MET Life survey.  I only refer to a small window of what was learned through the data analysis.  The outcomes are clear that teachers, parents, and students value homework.  That students’ attitudes towards homework and success at completing homework impact their overall success in school.  Finally, that many teachers, parents, and students believe that most homework is busy work that is not an interesting and engaging part of the learning experience.

We have our work cut out for us in schools to get a handle on the homework issue.  The only way we will succeed in this adventure is if the SCHOOL is willing to take on the conversation with its faculty and create a set of homework policies that ensure homework is an effective and meaningful part of a student’s learning experience, one that counts towards their overall achievement.

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4 responses to “What’s the value of homework and should it be graded?”

When you last headed a division or entire school, what was your homework policy? Was math the same as English? Was 6th grade the same as 10th grade? Were other assessment policies similarly aligned among classes, or just HW? I am curious because I have so many questions about HW.

When I was the Division Director at North Shore Country Day School, it was very hard in the high school to get faculty to think seriously about a homework policy. The most I could get them to move on was a test calendar policy that put some balance and restrictions on when teachers or departments could give tests. We had a test calendar that teachers had to use. No more than two tests, papers, or major assignments could be due on any one day. If a teacher was not well organized, they really struggled finding the space to give their major assessments. It put the responsibility on teachers to plan. Homework was harder to get a handle on. Departments did different things although we were able to get most departments to monitor the way homework was graded among their teachers. Remember it was a smaller school.

The most responsive school that I worked at was Marlborough School. As Director of Studies at a 7-12 grade school and the person in charge of the Educational Council, which had authority for setting academic policies, we were able to create school-wide policies in areas such as test make-up, late work, extra-credit, and homework. As a high-end girls school in LA, the faculty, school, and community were quite sensitive to academic stress. Marlborough is a high-achieving school with a great number of type-A folks. Lots of pressure and lots of homework. When I arrived and became the Director of Studies (like Dean of Faculty at WMS), I was able to guide the department chairs to think seriously about policies that helped manage the academic environment and made it reasonable. The only thing on homework that we were unable to really accomplish is the part about relevant and meaningful. That issue was a nut that was hard to crack. Teachers were still wedded to their–20 math problems at the end of the chapter, 30 pages of reading a night, some worksheets in MS earth science, etc.

I think this issue is a tough one as you mention. Hard to get a handle on and move faculty in a positive direction. What would it feel like if faculty had “irrelevant and meaningless” homework in 5-6 subjects on most nights. Of course some of the homework students receive is very meaningful and very necessary. I get concerned that a good deal of it has the effect of turning them off vs. turning them on to school. And when I hear and read that some teachers don’t even give good constructive feedback on the homework they assign or count it in the grade, that makes my skin boil. And these are good teachers, at least I think they are. That concerns me for students.

It might be interesting to do a quick and easy anonymous Survey Monkey piece to canvas the JHS faculty and see what shakes out on these questions. Data helps. However, the MET Life survey is amazingly complete.

Have you read ASCD on HW: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept10/vol68/num01/Five-Hallmarks-of-Good-Homework.aspx

Yes! I have seen that piece.

Don Doran shared this from NY Times today. Take a look if you have not seen it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/quality-homework-a-smart-idea.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

Thanks for sharing with me.

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Opinion Graded homework is too restrictive for curious students

Though Valerie Strauss’s Feb. 6 Answer Sheet column, “ A deep dive into whether — and how — homework should be graded, ” hit many important points in the case for the elimination of homework grades, it skimmed over an essential one: Grading homework transforms an organic learning process into the work of searching for the correct answer.

As the director of Talaria Summer Institute, a scientific research program for high school students, I’ve repeatedly witnessed that it is teenagers’ nature to follow their curiosity and explore new topics creatively when facing a question, oftentimes designing their own trial-and-error approaches.

In the restrictive, stressful setting of graded homework, teenagers suppress their natural curiosity and resort to googling and ChatGPT to quickly find the right answer. Without grading, students can use homework as an opportunity for exploration without fear of bringing down the letter on their report card. Similarly, teachers can give more open-ended, creative assignments without the headache of creating rubrics to judge them.

By eliminating homework grades, we can ditch an ineffective rewards system for fostering the natural curiosity essential to all young thought-leaders.

Nora Sun , Chicago

The writer is founder and executive director of Talaria Summer Institute, ENVISION Research Competition and ATHENA By Women In STEM.

IM 6–12 Math: Grading and Homework Policies and Practices

By Jennifer Willson,  Director, 6–12 Professional Learning Design

In my role at IM, working with teachers and administrators, I am asked to help with the challenges of implementing an IM curriculum. One of the most common challenges is: how can we best align these materials to our homework and grading practices? This question is a bit different from “How should we assess student learning?” or “How should we use assessment to inform instruction?” 

When we created the curriculum, we chose not to prescribe homework assignments or decide which student work should count as a graded event. This was deliberate—homework policies and grading practices are highly variable, localized, and values-driven shared understandings that evolve over time. For example, the curriculum needed to work for schools where nightly, graded assignments are expected; schools where no work done outside of class is graded; and schools who take a feedback-only approach for any formative work.

IM 6–8 Math was released in 2017, and IM Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 in 2019. In that time, I’ve been able to observe some patterns in the ways schools and teachers align the materials to their local practices. So, while we’re still not going to tell you what to do, we’re now in a position to describe some trends and common ways in which schools and districts make use of the materials to meet their local constraints. Over the past four years, I have heard ideas from teachers, administrators, and IM certified facilitators. In December, I invited our IM community to respond to a survey to share grading and homework policies and practices. In this post I am sharing a compilation of results from the 31 teachers who responded to the survey, as well as ideas from conversations with teachers and IMCFs. We hope that you find some ideas here to inform and inspire your classroom.

How do teachers collect student responses?

Most teachers who responded to the survey collect student work for assessments in a digital platform such as LearnZillion, McGraw-Hill, ASSISTments, Edulastic, Desmos, etc. Others have students upload their work (photo, PDF, etc.) to a learning management system such as Canvas or Google classroom. Even fewer ask students to respond digitally to questions in their learning management system.

How do teachers tend to score each type of assessment, and how is feedback given?

The table shows a summary of how teachers who responded to the survey most often provide feedback for the types of assessments included in the curriculum.

How are practice problems used?

Every lesson in the curriculum (with a very small number of exceptions) includes a short set of cumulative practice problems. Each set could be used as an assignment done in class after the lesson or worked on outside of class, but teachers make use of these items in a variety of ways to meet their students’ learning needs.

While some teachers use the practice problems that are attached to each lesson as homework, others do not assign work outside of class. Here are some other purposes for which teachers use the practice problems:

• extra practice
• student reflection
• as examples to discuss in class or use for a mini-lesson
• as a warm-up question to begin class
• as group work during class

How do teachers structure time and communication to “go over” practice problems?

It’s common practice to assemble practice problems into assignments that are worked on outside of class meeting time. Figuring out what works best for students to get feedback on practice problems while continuing to move students forward in their learning and work through the next lesson can be challenging. 

Here are some ways teachers describe how they approach this need:

• We don’t have time to go over homework every day, but I do build in one class period per section to pause and look at some common errors in cool-downs and invite students to do some revisions where necessary, then I also invite students to look at select practice problems. I collect some practice problems along with cool-downs and use that data to inform what, if anything, I address with the whole class or with a small group.
• Students vote for one practice problem that they thought was challenging, and we spend less than five minutes to get them started. We don’t necessarily work through the whole problem.
• I post solutions to practice problems, sometimes with a video of my solution strategy, so that students can check their work.
• I assign practice problems, post answers, invite students to ask questions (they email me or let me know during the warm-up), and then give section quizzes that are closely aligned to the practice problems, which is teaching my students that asking questions is important.
• I invite students to vote on the most challenging problem and then rather than go over the practice problem I weave it into the current day’s lesson so that students recognize “that’s just like that practice problem!” What I find important is moving students to take responsibility to evaluate their own understanding of the practice problems and not depend on me (the teacher) or someone else to check them. Because my district requires evidence of a quiz and grade each week and I preferred to use my cool-downs formatively, I placed the four most highly requested class practice problems from the previous week on the quiz which I substituted for that day’s cool-down. That saved me quiz design time, there were no surprises for the students, and after about four weeks of consistency with this norm, the students quickly learned that they should not pass up their opportunity to study for the quiz by not only completing the 4–5 practice problems nightly during the week, but again, by reflecting on their own depth of understanding and being ready to give me focused feedback about their greatest struggle on a daily basis.
• I see the practice problems as an opportunity to allow students to go at different paces. It’s more work, but I include extension problems and answers to each practice problem with different strategies and misconceptions underneath. When students are in-person for class, they work independently or in pairs moving to the printed answer keys posted around the room for each problem. They initial under different prompts on the answer key (tried more than one strategy, used a DNL, used a table, made a mistake, used accurate units, used a strategy that’s not on here…) It gives the students and I more feedback when I collect the responses later and allows me to be more present with smaller groups while students take responsibility for checking their work. It also gets students up and moving around the room and normalizes multiple approaches as well as making mistakes as part of the problem solving process.

Quizzes—How often, and how are they made?

Most of the teachers give quizzes—a short graded assessment completed individually under more controlled conditions than other assignments. How often is as varied as the number of teachers who responded: one per unit, twice per unit, once a week, two times per week, 2–3 times per quarter.

If teachers don’t write quiz items themselves or with their team, the quiz items come from practice problems, activities, and adapted cool-downs.

When and how do students revise their work?

Policies for revising work are also as varied as the number of teachers who responded. 

Here are some examples:

• Students are given feedback as they complete activities and revise based on their feedback.
• Students revise cool-downs and practice problems.
• Students can revise end-of-unit assessments and cool-downs.
• Students can meet with me at any time to increase a score on previous work.
• Students revise cool-downs if incorrect, and they are encouraged to ask for help if they can’t figure out their own error.
• Students can revise graded assignments during office hours to ensure successful completion of learning goals.
• Students are given a chance to redo assignments after I work with them individually.
• Students can review and revise their Desmos activities until they are graded.
• We make our own retake versions of the assessments.
• Students can do error logs and retakes on summative assessments.
• We complete the student facing tasks together as a whole class on Zoom in ASSISTments. If a student needs to revise the answers they notify me during the session.

Other advice and words of wisdom

I also asked survey participants for any other strategies that both have and haven’t worked in their classrooms. Here are some responses.

What have you tried that has not worked?

• Going over practice problems with the whole class every day. The ones who need it most often don’t benefit from the whole-class instruction, and the ones who don’t need it distract those who do. 
• Grading work on the tasks within the lessons for accuracy
• Leaving assignments open for the length of the semester so that students can always see unfinished work
• Going through problems on the board with the whole class does not correct student errors
• Most students don’t check feedback comments unless you look at them together
• Grading images of student work on the classroom activity tasks uploaded by students in our learning management systems
• Providing individual feedback on google classroom assignments was time consuming and inefficient
• Allowing students to submit late and missing work with no penalty
• Trying to grade everything
• Below grade 9, homework really does not work.
• Going over every practice problem communicates that students do not really think about the practice problems on their own. 

What else have you tried that has worked well?

• My students do best when I consistently assign practice problems. I have tried giving them an assignment once a week but most students lose track. It is better to give 2–3 problems or reflective prompts after every class, which also helps me get ahead of misconceptions.
• I don’t grade homework since I am unsure who completes it with or for the students.
• A minimum score of 50% on assignments, which allows students the opportunity to recover, in terms of their grade in the class
• Time constraints imposed during remote learning impact the amount and type of homework I give as well as what I grade
• Give fewer problems than normal on second chance assignments
• I have used platforms such as Kahoot to engage students in IM material. I also build Google Forms to administer the Check Your Readiness pre-assessment and End-of-Unit assessments, but I may start using ASSISTments for this in the future.
• The value of homework in high school is okay, but personally I skip good for great.
• Students are able to go back and revise their independent practice work upon recognizing their mistakes and learning further about how to solve the problems.
• Sometimes I select only one or two slides to grade instead of the whole set when I use Desmos activities.
• Allow for flexibility in timing. Give students opportunities for revision.
• Frequent short assessments are better than longer tests, and they allow students to focus on specific skills and get feedback more frequently.
• Especially during the pandemic, many of my students are overwhelmed and underachieving. I am focusing on the core content.
• Homework assignments consist of completing Desmos activities students began in class. Additional slides contain IM practice problems.
• I am only grading the summative assessment for accuracy and all else for completion. I want the students to know that they have the room to learn, try new strategies and be wrong while working on formative assessments.

What grading and homework policies have worked for you and your students that aren’t listed? Share your ideas in the comments so that we can all learn from your experience.

What would you like to learn more about? Let us know in the comments, and it will help us design future efforts like this one so that we can all learn more in a future blog post.

We are grateful to the teachers and facilitators who took the time to share their learning with us.

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When Grading Harms Student Learning

Instead of issuing zeros, penalizing late work, and grading formative assessments, teachers should make the classroom a place of hope instead of fear.

There are so many forces at work that make educators grade, and grade frequently. For sports eligibility, coaches constantly look at grades to see if a student is at an academic level that will allow him or her to play. Colleges review transcripts to examine what type of courses students took and their corresponding grades. Teachers must follow policy that demands them to enter a certain amount of grades every week, month, or marking period. There's no stopping it. However, we need to reflect upon policies and practices like this -- and possibly consider regulating them. Is grading the focus, or is learning the focus? Yes, grades should and can reflect student learning, but often they can get in the way and actually harm student learning.

The Dreaded Zero

I used to give out zeros in the hopes that it would force students to do work and learn. This was a terrible idea! I'm so happy that I received the professional development and resources to challenge my thinking on how I was graded as a student. Myron Dueck notes that students need to care about consequences, and many students simply don't care about zeros. In fact, some of them will say, "Fine, I'll take the zero," which totally defeats the intended purpose and in fact destroys any leverage that I have to help students learn. Zeros do not reflect student learning. They reflect compliance. Instead of zeros, we should enter incompletes, and use these moments to correct behavioral errors and mistakes. Often, one zero can mathematically destroy a student's grade and pollute an overall metric that should reflect student learning. Here, grading is getting in the way of truly helping a student, as well as showing what that student really knows.

Points Off for Late Work

I'm guilty of this one as well. Similar to using zeros, when students didn't turn in work on time, I threated them with a deduction in points . Not only didn't this correct the behavior, but it also meant that behavioral issues were clouding the overall grade report. Instead of reflecting that students had learned, the grade served as an inaccurate reflection of the learning goal. Well, I certainly learned from this experience, and instead began using late work as a time to actually address the behavioral issue of turning in late work. It was a teachable moment. I had students reflect on what got in the way, apply their problem-solving skills to these issues, and set new goals. Students should learn the responsibility of turning in work on time, but not at the cost of a grade that doesn't actually represent learning.

Grading "Practice"

Many of our assignments are "practice," assigned for students to build fluency and practice a content or skill. Students are often "coming to know" rather than truly knowing. Consequently, these assignments are formative assessments, reflecting a step in the learning process and not a final outcome or goal. Formative assessment should inform instruction. It should not be graded. If we assign a grade to failed practice, the overall grade won't reflect what they learned. It won't be a reflection of success, and it may even deter students from trying again and learning. Practice assignments and homework can be assessed, but they shouldn't be graded.

Grading Instead of Teaching

As mentioned earlier, many teachers are required to enter grades on a frequent basis. While this policy may be well intended, in practice it can become a nightmare and run afoul to the intent. Districts and schools often call for frequent grades so that students, parents, and other stakeholders know what a child knows, and what he or she needs to learn next. This is a great intent. In fact, we should formatively assess our students and give everyone access to the "photo album" of learning rather than a single "snapshot." However, if we educators do nothing but grade, we rob ourselves of the time that we need to teach. We've all been in a situation where grading piles up, and so we put the class on a task to make time for grading. This is wrong, and it should be the other way around. Teaching and learning should take precedence over grading and entering grades into grade books. If educators are spending an inordinate amount of time grading rather than teaching and assessing students, then something needs to change.

Our work as educators is providing hope to our students. If I use zeros, points off for late work, and the like as tools for compliance, I don't create hope. Instead, I create fear of failure and anxiety in learning. If we truly want our classrooms to be places for hope, then our grading practices must align with that mission. Luckily, standards-based grading, mastery-based grading, and competency-based learning are making strides in many schools, districts, and states. These methods more accurately align with the premise that "it's never too late to learn." If you want to learn more about equitable grading practices, read work by Ken O'Connor , Myron Dueck , Dylan Wiliam , and Rick Wormeli .

With that, I will leave you with an essential question to ponder: How can we grade and assess in a way that provides hope to all students?

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How to Give Meaningful Homework, Even When It’s Not Graded

“Is this going to be graded?” Oh, how we love to hear this.

Most students are motivated by grades and if they know that an assignment isn’t going to be graded, it becomes about as important to them as finding a good mutual fund to invest in for retirement. So how do you assign meaningful homework when your district has a policy that doesn’t allow for it to be graded?

It has taken several years for my team and I to figure out what works best in our classrooms, and we continue to tweak the process. Here are some strategies that we have come up with for meaningful homework assignments.

1. Assign quality over quantity.

As a math teacher, I was used to assigning upwards of twenty problems a night that were often repetitive and lacked depth. Depending on the subject, try to assign only a handful of problems that allow students to practice what they learned, and one or two that really challenge their critical thinking skills.

2. Encourage more.

Even if I’m only assigning a handful of problems, there are always more available. Try to narrow down the problems to cover a range of difficulty, and a variety of strategies that must be used. There’s still no way I can get students to do every type of problem I want them to practice and keep their homework manageable. Let students know that if they find the problems that were assigned to be difficult, then they need to do more on their own. Most will. Some will do it on the nightly homework, some will do it when studying for the test, but the students who want to do well will always do extra when they’re struggling.

3. Don’t grade it, but still kinda grade it.

Many teachers used to grade homework only on completion and that inflated students’ grades. If we grade only summative assessments, then the grade accurately reflects what students know, which is how it should be. But, it’s still nice to keep track of completion both for ourselves and for parents. It’s nice to be able to say, “Well, maaaaaaybe the reason your son isn’t doing well is that he only completes 40% of the homework.”

4. Put homework problems on assessments—and let the students know that you’re doing it.

I have taken homework problems and put the exact same problem on a quiz or test. When we go over the quiz or test, I tell my students, “If you did the practice problems I suggested the night before the test, this was one of them.” If students didn’t understand that doing the homework will help them on the assessments before they took it, this idea will quickly become very clear to them and they will want to start doing the homework.

5. Make it a requirement for something else.

My district also requires teachers to allow test retakes, and teachers can decide what makes a student eligible to retake. No homework? No retake. You may choose to require only a certain percentage of the work to be done. Or, you may require that no assignments were late. You might even allow the retake on the condition that they go back and make up work that was missing. If students didn’t make an effort to learn the material before the assessment, then they don’t get to retake.

6. Grade it.

I know, I know. I said we can’t grade it. BUT, we can if it’s NOT practice. If the concept has been taught previously and students have had time to practice multiple times and come in for help if they needed it, you can go ahead and assign it as homework and grade it. You might tell students that once a week you will collect homework and grade a review problem. Then do it – don’t make it an empty threat, make it part of your homework policy. You can even wait until you have gone over it in class before you collect it. The only excuse for not getting it correct is that they simply chose not to do it and not to fix it when given the opportunity.

7. Invite them to a homework party!

If you have students who habitually fall behind on the homework and show no interest in catching up, invite them to a homework party after school. Give them an invitation and let them know attendance is mandatory. (Yes, this is a detention, but it’s disguised as a party! Kids love parties!). Often, students who aren’t doing homework need the extra help anyway and won’t come in without you requiring it. Some students will be pushed to do the homework to avoid your super fun parties. The students who really need extra help will see this as a more positive alternative to a detention.

8. No homework, no test.

I’ve known teachers who would not allow a student to take a test until all the homework was done. This can be a nightmare, because some students will simply choose not to take the test either! (Then they get their invitation to the homework party.) This one works best when nothing else seems to work with the habitual homework avoiders who really do need the practice to be successful. It also works better when you provide additional help to the student so they can complete the work, since it’s very likely that they’re not doing it because they’re discouraged.

9. Let them choose.

This one is especially useful when faced with a chapter review which has dozens of problems. You know what’s going to happen if you tell them to pick ten problems. They will pick the ten easiest problems. But if you assign ten problems, you might be assigning problems that some students don’t really need to practice. Tell them to pick one problem in each group of 10 in order to do some easy problems and some advanced problems.

What are your strategies for creating meaningful homework? Please share in the comments.

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Grading formula and assigned work

Your final average is a weighted combination of your averages on examlets and other PrairieLearn assignments. Specifically:

• Examlets (including the final) are worth 84%
• The weekly in-class problems are worth 10%
• The homeworks are worth 6%

When we translate these averages into final letter grades, a score of 90 will be at least an A-, 80 at least a B-, 70 at least a C-, 50 at least a D-. If the raw scores are running excessively low, we may revise these cutoffs to be more generous. However, this has happened only very rarely in recent years. In recent terms, around three quarters of the grades have been A's and B's.

Monitoring grades

You are responsible for keeping an eye on your PrairieLearn gradebook and promptly reporting apparent errors. See the  FAQ  for how to report grading and/or entry problems.

If the scores you are receiving alarm you,  seek help .

Readings and lectures

On Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, class will begin with a small lecture to cover important course material before we do group problem solving. However, you are also expected to prepare for each lecture by doing the posted readings. If after our in-class lecture you still have questions, please see the posted lecture videos and accompanying notes for clarification.  

There will be weekly examlets starting on the second week of the term---these account for most of your final course average. We plan 7 weekly examlets (one of which is the 'final'), each 1 hour 50 minutes long.

Sign up for each examlet far in advance!  The CBTF usually opens signups on PrairieTest 11 days before each examlet. Timeslots may fill up, and we will not accept "the CBTF ran out of timeslots" as an excuse for missing an examlet.

We do not drop any examlet scores.  See the  missed work page  for how to arrange a makeup.

The final examlet which will partially cover the most recent material like any other examlet, and partially review old material. The final is the same length and worth the same amount as a normal examlet.

Questions on examlets are sometimes exact copies of homework or study problems, or problems used in past terms. They might be entirely new. Or they might look similar to past problems but differ in critical details. We make no promises about whether you will or won't be doing a problem that you've seen before. Similarly, makeups and retake exams may use previously-seen problems and/or new ones. Therefore, when studying for an examlet, concentrate on mastering general skills rather than memorizing specific solutions.

In-class problems and Homeworks

Each class (MWRF) will consist of a short lecture followed by in-class problem solving. You will be assigned approximately 2 problems each day for a total of ~8 problems each week. On Monday of the following week, we will randomly select one problem from that set to be graded; it will be due at midnight. We will grade for completion and return it promptly with feedback on Tuesday to help you prepare for the upcoming examlet. 

The weekly homework will be due at the end of the exam period (on Thursday). These are autograded on PrairieLearn, and you can submit them as many times as needed to get full credit.

We'll drop your lowest in-class problem grade and your lowest homework grade when computing your final averages.

No TikTok? No problem. Here's why you shouldn't rush to buy your child a phone.

With so many kids online so much of the time, our children are more exposed than ever to dangers they're not ready to guard themselves against..

The longer I am a mother , the more I find myself reflecting on my childhood and how it compares and contrasts with my daughters' lives.

So much is the same: picky eaters, feet that grow out of new shoes too fast, tears spilled over math homework and talks about who said what to whom on the playground.

But there is one thing that makes everything about being a kid so different today: cellphones .

Phones have changed how kids interact

When I was in third grade, about 1992, my small, private school in Denver had one big hulk of a computer that we wheeled around the whole building for each classroom to use.

Today, kids as young as 8 (or less) have social media accounts on their own smartphones, where they spend hours every day living entire lives in a 4x7 inch screen. Incessantly scrolling, chatting and comparing.

I get why parents want their kids to have phones: mainly to stay in touch. I also get that screen time for kids and teens means free time for us. When we are constantly being emailed and texted, when the demands to do so many things professionally and for our kids are at an all-time high, when we want a minute to scroll mindlessly as we descend down the rabbit hole that is Pinterest (or pick your poison), cellphones and tablets provide momentary respite from our overbooked days.

And there's nothing new about warning of the dangers of cellphones for kids (or for us). But phones are so ubiquitous that we read the bad news about the latest study, feel guilty and quickly move on.

I want to remind you why we should be thinking, and talking, about our kids' cellphone use.

Phones are everywhere: 95% of teens say they have access to a cellphone, and 58% of teens report using TikTok daily, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey .

With that many kids online, that much of the time, our children are more exposed than ever to dangers they're not ready to guard themselves against: stolen identities, pornography, pedophilia, the list goes on.

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There's also the issue of how phones and social media make kids feel about themselves. In " The Conquest of Happiness ," Bertrand Russell wrote: "The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is a fatal one."

But that's what social media is – one big social comparison. Who has a better body? Who has more money? Who has a more interesting life? More friends? More likes?

For teens and preteens with all the additional difficulties that accompany those years, that sounds like a heavy burden. And it is: Teen suicide rates are rising , and while social media isn't the only factor, in some cases we know it's a contributor .

Should kids be allowed to have phones?

I have other questions that the research doesn't answer.

What is smartphone use doing to kids' ability to be creative? How will that affect their capacity to deal with the parade of letdowns and monotony that is such a integral part of human existence? When our children grow up, will they be able to handle not being entertained? Will they be able to carry a conversation?

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Phones and kids should be an ongoing conversation in our homes. We should be talking about the dangers of addiction. We need to teach them that obsessing over other people's lives, or comparing themselves with another person they may or may not know, isn't healthy or helpful. We want to show them that being able to strike up, hold and gracefully walk away from a conversation is an art that needs practice. And they need to understand that being bored is OK.

Now, I am not a masochist – my kids have tablets that they watch movies and play games on. I am not saying kids should never have a phone or a tablet.

But kids and parents need to do more handholding and hugging, more talking and discussing, more daydreaming. We need to get back to resting in the grass and experiencing that peaceful feeling of watching the clouds float by. And we need fewer handheld objects to distract and entertain us.

Life is short, childhood is even shorter. Let's work harder to save our kids from a childhood spent inside a phone.

Carli Pierson is a digital editor at USA TODAY  and a New York-licensed attorney.