Homework Problems

[Jenine Killebrew]

Infact, while the push to eliminate homework may come as a surprise to many adults, the debate is not new. Parents and educators have been talking about this subject for the last century, so that the educational pendulum continues to swing back and forth between the need for homework and the need to eliminate homework.

The National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association recommend that students spend 10 minutes per grade level per night on homework. That means that first graders should spend 10 minutes on homework, second graders 20 minutes and so on. But a study published by The American Journal of Family Therapy found that students are getting much more than that.

In the scope of world history, homework is a fairly new construct in the U.S. Students of all ages have been receiving work to complete at home for centuries, but it was educational reformer Horace Mann who first brought the concept to America from Prussia.

School work assigned and completed outside of school hours is not without its benefits. Numerous studies have shown that regular homework has a hand in improving student performance and connecting students to their learning. When reviewing these studies, take them with a grain of salt; there are strong arguments for both sides, and only you will know which solution is best for your students or school.

To help students find the right balance and succeed, teachers and educators must start the homework conversation, both internally at their school and with parents. But in order to successfully advocate on behalf of students, teachers must be well educated on the subject, fully understanding the research and the outcomes that can be achieved by eliminating or reducing the homework burden. There is a plethora of research and writing on the subject for those interested in self-study.

For teachers looking for a more in-depth approach or for educators with a keen interest in educational equity, formal education may be the best route. If this latter option sounds appealing, there are now many reputable schools offering online master of education degree programs to help educators balance the demands of work and family life while furthering their education in the quest to help others.

I guess it was inevitable, but quite often I see homework problems on r/microservices seemingly assigned in some intro CS class. Peculiarities of that aside, they can be quite fun to work through as thought experiments. One recent one came up:

This highlights a very common mistake I see when folks try to carve out service boundaries, especially from a naive outsider perspective. The business domain here is "school app", but no description on what the app actually needs to do. The microservices are "fairly obvious", being "teacher, student, etc."

Already we see the mistake - building service boundaries around the "nouns" in our business domain. But that way lies madness, it will produce designs where we're trying to do SQL joins via web API calls. I said as much in my reply to designing the boundaries:

From the outside it's quite challenging to understand how the business organizes itself internally. That's why it's so critical to have those conversations and design sessions with domain and business experts. It's usually by design we don't know how the sausage is made. But it if you want to successfully design service boundaries, you have to tour the sausage factory.

In the school case, I'd talk to school administrators to understand the business of running a university. I'd track how the administrative departments are delineated, what responsibilties each have, how and when each they communicate, for what workflows, and so on. It can be complicated and complex, and I'll often get "sorry this must be boring" from the domain experts, but it's only through this deeper analysis we'll get the insight into the "how".

Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.

* Greater stress: 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.

* Reductions in health: In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.

The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.

I taught Calculus 2 at my institution the past two semesters and several students have left comments in their course evaluations that advocate grading homework problems based on whether they were completed, not whether they were correct. For instance, when asked, "What changes to the course would you recommend?", one student wrote:

I think they have a good point here. I view homework as required practice of the course material. Furthermore, I've realized that grading every problem carefully for correctness is prohibitively time-consuming for me!

I would like to implement a new grading scheme next year wherein homework problems will be assigned and I will give a grade based on whether they were done, and add some helpful comments about what students should work on. Ideally, everyone will get just about full credit on this component of their grade. (Perhaps someone will skip an assignment during a busy week, but if someone actually puts in effort, they will get credit.)

However, I'm not sure how to synthesize this new idea with the overall grading scheme. Previously, I made homework assignments were 15-20% of a student's final grade. It feels strange, though, to essentially make this a "gimme" portion of their grade just for doing the problems. But if I lower this to 10%, what should I do ... Have another in-class exam? That eats up class meeting time. Have regular quizzes? That also takes up some time, and should I grade those carefully on correctness, even though the students are not used to that? Should I have a once-a-month "take home exam" that amounts to being a difficult homework assignment of sorts?

Essentially, my question boils down to this: I fully intend to take these students' suggestion and assign regular homework problems to be graded solely on completion, and not correctness. I am curious about how to modify the rest of my grading scheme so that the students' final grades are still accurate and fair, and without too much extra class time taken away.

I am interested in personal suggestions/anecdotes here, as well as any education research (if there is any). I am particularly interested if you have made a similar change and can explain some observed differences in the two schemes.

(Note: There is a great answer here to the question, "Is it worth grading calculus homework?". My question is not the same; I have already decided to implement this "grade for completion and add suggestive comments" method, partly based on that answer I linked to. I am curious about adjusting other components of the course to account for this decision.)

There's a compromise between "correctness" and "completion" called "Standards-based grading". Here's a few links about it with various people who have tried using it for Calculus: -calculus2/, -based-grading-implementation.html, , -abs.html

You can implement it in a variety of ways, but the general idea is that associate all problems you give in the course with one or more "standard(s)" that you expect students who pass to achieve, and you give students (effectively) infinite attempts to "pass" each standard. In general, this means that, for students who don't need the extra practice, they can do very few problems, but for the students who need significant practice, they can keep on trying until they're solid.

Often, courses that use SBG do it on exams too, but you could probably only do it on the homework if you wanted. And you can still give students significant credit for attempting the problems, but this way, still making the homework a "gimme"--they still have to try, but only until they get it.

One clear concern here is the overhead of keeping all this information (since you now need to record which standards students are passing, possibly review more [but smaller!] batches of hw, etc.). In general, I think the benefits outweigh the extra overhead though, particularly, because there should be (a) fewer grading overall and (b) more significant learning overall.

In my Discrete Math class I give many (some 6 to 8) homework problems, which check if they know how to work carefully on problems related to what is seen in class. This is 30% of the grade. With the TAs, we select 3 problems each week. One is to be solved by the TA, asking for input from the class; one is solved by the class, perhaps asking the TA for guidance; and one is solved individually, graded as turned in or not. This is 5%. And a midterm (30%) and a final (35%).

In homework they have time, and can consult external sources and use whatever tools they want, grading is according to work done carefully and completely. What I want is that they understand what they turn in, even if they got it off MSE, so a "random" selection of students get their grade from explaining to the TA what they turned in, not by grading what was turned in. The sessions with the TAs are geared towards not having them cram the day before the exams (which has shown time and again leads to a masacre), the exams are meant so see if they understand the material (apply it in situations at most mildly ouside what was seen in class/homework, do not ask for careful development but e.g. just explain how to set up or solve a problem, or why something is done a specific way).

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