One goal of our middle school staff is to get a handle on students consistently completing homework. To that end we discussed how we grade it, should we grade it, how should we weight it, how much of it should we assign, etc. This discussion led us to the topic of student motivation.
We did talk about the importance of practice, which homework provides, but we did not talk about the importance, or rather the primacy, of feedback to homework.
A cover story to the April 4th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education described the trend at several colleges to out-source the grading of student writing assignments to a private company not only to" relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task," but because of the value of "consistent, detailed feedback" that these services provide keeps students engaged and learning. "We tend to drop the ball when it comes to giving rich feedback, and in the end this hurts the student," said one professor.
The idea that rich consistent feedback from assignments (homework) might be the key to engaging our middle school students enough to keep them practicing through a semester is an idea worth pursuing.
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