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« Twitter, Simply Complicated. The Homework Option Plan May 22, 2011 by tomwhitby I was recently asked, along with several other educators, to comment on a post dealing with grading homework. The premise on which we were asked to comment involved a teacher grading homework and giving a zero as a grade to those students who did not do the assignment. This is not an uncommon practice amongst educators. I employed this strategy myself for many years. It was and probably still is an accepted strategy, but after decades of teaching, I have grown to a point where i am not a big believer in giving homework. I stated my homework philosophy in this post, Hmwk: Less Value or Valueless? If homework is to be given by a teacher, students need to believe that the teacher will value their efforts in completing it. Homework requires a sacrifice of personal time on the part of the student. If students observe that the teacher is not at least checking homework, they will not spend time, which is important to them, doing the assignments that are not valued. A mistake often made however, is that rather than assess the work, the teacher records a zero, or a failing homework grade for the student. This would also apply to a project prepared outside of the class that was to be presented at a specific time, a deadline. I see assessment having two functions. The formative assessment is to tell me how much the s

he zero seems more like retribution for not finding value in what the teacher values, or has been told to value. It’s more of a control thing, and not an assessment thing. If a student consistently performs well in class, how is it that when assessed on the same skills performed outside the class in the form of homework, the work gets a zero? It is a power issue.

If the grade is an assessment of the work, and the student’s understanding, but it was not done, how can it be assessed?

And yet, no dancer, no musician and no athlete gains credit for their practice except through their actual performance in the event. We do not applaud the dancer or musician during practice. We do not add statistics from practice to the athlete’s record.

he assessment should actually be of the effectiveness of the teacher’s instruction and in what areas the teacher should continue to provide instruction to assist student mastery.

Homework allows both the student and teacher to determine if there is understanding of the subject and/or where problems

Keep the answer book open in the back of the room.  The practice isn't graded anyways.  This sends a message that the homework is for learning, not grading.

But why would a student do the work if it isn't graded?  Because your homework is directly aligned to what will be on your assessments.  

Our goal with both programs is to get completed work, not punish kids.

The ability to be able to “dig deeper” into what a final grade represents and how it can be used to report learning not only intrigued the admissions officers, but it generated an entire discussion around what else a competency-based grading and reporting system could do for students.

A “competency” is the ability of a student to apply content knowledge and skills in and/or across the content area(s).

In contrast, O’Connor (2009) defines a formative assessment as “an assessment for learning and can broadly be described as a “snapshot” or a “dipstick” measure that captures a student’s progress through the learning process.

tudents who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework. 

One, students, teachers, parents, and administrators expect me to, and when I don’t I am labeled an “easy” teacher, viewed as less serious or rigorous than my colleagues. Parents may rage about the veritable avalanche of homework that threatens to suffocate their children, but in my experience, parents also view that avalanche as a badge of honor, evidence of academic rigor.

I tried to picture a school year in which I shoehorn all of this work in to class time. I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.

Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior

If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.