Effective homework is based on 8 key principles:. W Work is done independently or with appropriate support. Homework should have a clear purpose, and students should understand the purpose of the assignment or activity. During my first year of teaching, another teacher told me to assign homework every night. Homework is an extension of your instruction, so it should always have a specific purpose, just like your lessons.
Homework should provide students an opportunity to be successful. On one occasion, I was in an elementary school classroom watching a lesson on fractions. Do the rest for homework. Homework is more effective when the focus is on quality as opposed to quantity. More is not necessarily better, particularly when students are just beginning to understand a concept. Perfect practice makes perfect. I would prefer to give my students small opportunities to show me they understand so that I can build on that foundation in the future.
Effective homework assignments extend, reinforce, or preview content. If students have mastered the material, you may choose to assign an independent project to enhance their understanding or allow them to apply their knowledge.
After a unit on creating spreadsheets, you might ask students to build a budget using a spreadsheet. However, if students are just beginning to understand a skill, you may want them to complete additional practice to reinforce the knowledge.
When I taught parts of speech, for example, I would ask students to find examples in newspapers or magazines and bring them to class. At times, my homework previewed upcoming content. For example, one day, I asked my students to make a list of places that they or their family had visited. In some cases, you might be able to spread these tasks over the course of a week. For example, creating flash cards, a graphic organizer, chart, or notes with bullet points can help you become an active learner rather than a passive one.
Organize the tools you create with the homework assignment by date and topic so that you can review those items to prepare for quizzes, tests or projects. Jot questions down and be as specific as possible in order to seek out additional support from teachers or tutors. The more you can identify sources of confusion, the more you can proactively reach out to your support network — teachers, tutors and others — in order to get additional help.
At the start of each homework session, establish goals for completion of your tasks or assignments. Revisit the goals at the end of the session and acknowledge a sense of completion.
This goal-setting process builds confidence over time and helps you realize their potential even when faced with difficulties. A productive homework routine will help you realize that learning is an ongoing journey. In effect, teachers ask themselves, "What do I want to read at the end of this assignment? Asking questions like these about your assignment will help guarantee that writing tasks tie directly to your teaching goals in the class:.
Although it might seem awkward at first, working backwards from what you hope the final drafts will look like often produces the best assignment sheets. We recommend jotting down several points that will help you with this step in writing your assignments:. Writing tasks fill many different roles for students, so defining good writing assignments begins with the specific instructional context.
For that reason, the first key to writing a good assignment is tying the task to the specific course goals. After taking your class and its goals into account, though, several other principles can improve the writing tasks you assign and the writing you get from students.
Perhaps most important, as noted in the five principles section, is to consider the rhetorical situation. By this, writing experts mean that you should think carefully about the audience you want students to write to as well as the particular genre or format for the final document and the larger context for the document.
Setting up your writing assignment so that the target reader is someone other than you, the teacher, might result in the most improvement in student writing.
Students, after all, have had extensive experience writing to teachers, and students know that teachers are a "captive" audience. Your job mandates that you read carefully and respond to their texts.
So for students, the teacher is not necessarily a reader or audience that will motivate the best possible work on a writing task. Indeed, Hilgers et al. In many instances, the assignment called for a hypothetical audience other than the teacher, but even when the assignment didn't prompt students to write for readers other than the teacher, students directed their work toward "an individual they believed has specific content knowledge such as a CEO, coworker, or technician" Although some experts Freedman et al.
A further extension of this move toward providing rich writing contexts beyond the teacher involves writing tasks that actually target real readers. Many senior design projects and management projects in engineering and natural resources involve pairing students with actual clients so that students must take into account the particular needs of their readers. But even if your particular class doesn't allow you to pair students with actual clients or other readers, consider ways in which you can create a meaningful context with readers beyond the teacher in the classroom see, for example, Ward, Chamely-Wiik et al.
As they explain,. Students write with a local audience of classmates and a larger institutional context of the university community in mind. Students responded positively on affective surveys, a typical reaction to carefully designed writing tasks.
More significantly, "students in this chemistry course outperformed the majority of students across all undergraduate levels at the university" In addition to audience concerns, students also benefit from understanding how and why a particular format or genre helps them communicate with a target audience especially when we think of genres as those recurring rhetorical reactions to typical communicative situations.
From YouTube videos in organic chemistry Franz, to position papers in public relations Powell, to posters in physiology Mulnix, , teachers are helping students to write in genres that immediately connect them with the real readers of their future professional settings. Why does this attention to audience and genre seem to matter so much to student writing? In recent years, several studies Adam, ; Beaufort, ; Belfiore et al.
In particular, workplace literacy and socio-cognitive apprenticeship theory among related theoretical perspectives both emphasize the role that knowledgeable mentors within a workplace play as they initiate newcomers to the communicative context.
See especially Beaufort, , and Ding, , for social apprenticeship studies and Paretti, , on situated learning and activity theory. As Dias et al. And, as a result of the fluidity of discourse in varied workplace settings, writers themselves should be prepared for major development of their communication skills when they enter new workplaces.
MacKinnon's qualitative study of new analysts and economists at the Bank of Canada showed that. For the most part, moreover, students recognize that apprenticeship learning in academic settings provides both more structured scaffolding of writing tasks and lower-stakes learning. They thus embrace the learning opportunities when offered to them in academic classes.
The fifth principle noted in the general section on "what makes a good writing assignment? Many teachers approach this element of good assignment design by thinking carefully about assignment sequence.
This writing specialist and geoscientist take up the details of designing assignments with an eye to course goals. They also consider the importance of not overwhelming teachers and students the Less is More approach as they explain their specific process of questioning their assignments pp. Scaffolded assignments, such as the agricultural economics assignment noted in the Additional Resources section, help students reach a larger goal by asking them to collect resources in stages.
A final stage requires that students transform each of the earlier stages in a final document. Sequenced assignments, on the other hand, each stand independently, but each task builds on particular skills and challenges to enable students to meet a larger set of goals.
Herrington describes a scaffolded assignment with a preliminary plan for a major project followed by an annotated bibliography, early draft with cover note focused on successes and challenges thus far and final draft with cover note. See also Sin et al. Coe , on the other hand, describes a series of scaffolded writing tasks to help students build argument skills in philosophy, Alaimo et al. A well-designed assignment will make the elements of the task clear to students. This includes identifying relevant intermediate assignments and activities, such as topic proposals or literature reviews for longer assignments, as well as providing information about relevant writing, research, and collaboration processes.
In general, it is also advisable to list grading criteria on the assignment sheet. Making the assignment clear to students will help them better understand the scope and challenge of the assignment. It also is likely to produce better learning and performance. Good analytical writing is a rigorous and difficult task. It involves a process of editing and rewriting, and it is common to do a half dozen or more drafts. Because of the difficulty of analytical writing and the need for drafting, we will be completing the assignment in four stages.
A draft of each of the sections described below is due when we finish the class unit related to that topic see due dates on syllabus. I will read the drafts of each section and provide comments; these drafts will not be graded but failure to pass in a complete version of a section will result in a deduction in your final assignment grade.
Because of the time both you and I are investing in the project, it will constitute one-half of your semester grade. Papers will focus on the peoples and policies related to population, food, and the environment of your chosen country. As well as exploring each of these subsets, papers need to highlight the interrelations among them.
These interrelations should form part of your revision focus for the final draft. Important concepts relevant to the papers will be covered in class; therefore, your research should be focused on the collection of information on your chosen country or region to substantiate your themes.
Specifically, the paper needs to address the following questions. Developing countries have undergone large changes in population. Explain the dynamic nature of this continuing change in your country or region and the forces underlying the changes. Better papers will go beyond description and analyze the situation at hand. What is the nature of food consumption in your country or region?
Is the average daily consumption below recommended levels? Is food consumption increasing with economic growth? What is the income elasticity of demand? Use Engel's law to discuss this behavior. Is production able to stay abreast with demand given these trends? What is the nature of agricultural production: traditional agriculture or green revolution technology?
Is the trend in food production towards self-sufficiency? If not, can comparative advantage explain this? Does the country import or export food? Is the politico-economic regime supportive of a progressive agricultural sector? This is the third issue to be covered in class. It is crucial to show in your paper the environmental impact of agricultural production techniques as well as any direct impacts from population changes.
This is especially true in countries that have evolved from traditional agriculture to green revolution techniques in the wake of population pressures. While there are private benefits to increased production, the use of petroleum-based inputs leads to environmental and human health related social costs which are exacerbated by poorly defined property rights. Use the concepts of technological externalities, assimilative capacity, property rights, etc. What other environmental problems are evident?
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