What About Homework?

Homework can serve a couple different purposes. If a classroom is flipped, homework can be used to have students be introduced to material prior to class. They can take notes from a video or some other recording and have the notes already in their notebooks so that class time can be used for applying those notes. This would be similar to an English teacher assigning a chapter of a book to read so that the discussion the following day is more fruitful. If the classroom is not flipped, then homework is ideally used for practice. If students are  regularly expected to learn new concepts, uncover new truths, or create new techniques or practices with the use of homework, the endeavor is going to be largely unsuccessful. So let's be clear about what homework is and is not. Homework is the repetitive practice of skills and use of knowledge that was learned in class. Homework is not used to learn new material.

Grading Practice

Should we, or how should we grade practice? This question is constantly debated among teachers, especially in the context of SBG. In traditional grading, homework often counts as a significant portion of a student's grade. But how much? 20%? 80%? There are teachers that would say, "Yes!" to both numbers. How can there be such a large range in the significance of homework on a student's grade? It's largely arbitrary - whatever the teacher "feels" to be "about right." If we remember that homework is practice, though, it must remain a small portion of the grade, if any. Think sports: Has it been over 100 years since the Cubs won the World Series because their record in practice has never been good enough? What matters is how you do in games. I'm not arguing that practice is irrelevant; everyone agrees that practice matters, but practice isn't measured to determine success, games are.

Think of a teacher's training. Should a preservice teacher's first attempt at teaching a lesson in her freshman year in college affect her licensure? Of course not! What matters is how you do at the end, not how fast you got there. The diploma and license is a reflection of the final outcome, not the path. 

Make the connection back to homework. If homework is the practice of skills during the unit, and a grade is how well the student met the standard at the end of the learning segment, then it would be invalid to include homework in the grade. A standards-based grade says, "This student has met this benchmark," not "This student has met this benchmark, but it took him longer than most of the other students." Again, the path is irrelevant if the grade is measuring the student's final position.

Encouraging Mistakes

Practice is where mistakes should be encouraged. This is the case in sports. A basketball player might tweak his form in practice, leading to more missed shots so that eventually, he can become even more accurate than he was before. Would you feel more or less safe to make mistakes in practice if your performance affected how well your final success was rated? The more we count homework as a grade, the more students are pressured to make sure it's right. Unfortunately, this doesn't often lead to harder work on their part, but more cheating and copying. 

Give and Take

Many teachers react to this idea with shock and horror. "How will I ever get students to do their homework!?" they ask. Many teachers who are big advocates of SBG, and many authors and researchers in the field as well, agree that a small percentage in the overall grade is reasonable. Some teachers go with 0% weighted homework and do a great job of communicating and demonstrating the purpose and value of homework to their students and are able to convince their students to stay on top of homework assignments.  At Wheaton North, we use about 10% as the weight of homework. This doesn't have a huge influence on the student's grade, but it still provides some motivation to complete the homework.

Contingencies

Even with a 10% homework weight, you have to consider special scenarios:

• A student completes every single assignment and gets full credit for her homework, yet barely fails every test. The 10% homework grade brings her up to a D. Should she pass, even though she never passed a single test?
• Another student aces every single test yet never turns in a single assignment. Her zero in the 10% homework category brings her down to a B. Should she get a B even though she clearly understands all the course material?

Much has been written about the role of homework in SBG. This video, this video and this article are good places to start.