Homework
Encouraging students to use Quiz little and often is perfect for addressing the forgetting curve, but will require students to be self-motivated. Tasks is ideal for setting, monitoring, marking and recording homework. A teacher can set up multiple tasks in advance so that you don’t have to remember to make them available, and never forget to set a homework again!
How Smart Revise can be used to set homework
Tasks
There are lots of options when setting a homework task so that teachers can configure the type of work they want to set and how much marking they want to do. Twenty quiz questions with automatic marking, a single high mark question, defining all the terms in a topic or a mixture of all three is possible with Tasks.
Questions are chosen automatically to reduce teacher workload, but you can also change the questions that have been chosen. The task setting process informs the teacher how long a task should take the students to complete, so that the teacher can set the right volume of work easily.
The research
In his meta-analysis, John Hattie found that homework in secondary schools has a +0.64 effect size. That means when used appropriately it can have a significant impact on raising student attainment.
However, not all homework is equal. Research shows that 5-10 minutes spent practicing what has been taught has the same effect as 1-2 hours of work.
The highest impact is associated with rote learning, practice or rehearsal of subject matter; more task-orientated homework has higher effect than deep learning and problem solving. Overall, the more complex, open-ended and unstructured tasks have the lowest effect. Short, frequent homework closely monitored by teachers has more impact.
Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning. Routledge.
A teacher can:
- Create a task of any length for students using a simple five minute step-by-step process.
- Tag a task as homework so that they can be filtered in the mark book later.
- Clone a task to another class in the same year group.
The step-by-step process to creating a homework task
- Create: give the task a name, write optional instructions for students and add tags to the task to enable filtering in the mark book.
- Topics: select only those topics that have been taught so far. Use homework as an opportunity to assess previously learned material to aid in long term knowledge retention. You could choose just one topic to focus the homework on.
- Experience: choose the type of homework you want to set. Select only Quiz questions for zero marking but lots of data. Choose one high mark question for a more considered piece of work. Choose a small sample of different question types for a more balanced assignment.
- Questions: to save you time Tasks automatically chooses the questions but you can change them. Pay careful attention to the time to complete the task. You don’t want to set a task that violates your school’s homework policy. It is often better to be generous with the time and aim for questions that are under the recommended time so that students don’t feel they need to rush. It is usually better to get smaller but better pieces of work.
- Marking: choose who will mark the task: teacher, student or peer.
- Schedule: set the available from date/time when you want the task to be available to students. Remember to set the deadline too.
- Summary: check the details of the task are correct. For example, Smart Revise will advise you how long it should take a student to complete the work.
- Students: choose which students to assign the task to. You can also add and remove students later.
Marking homework
There are three options for marking. The teacher, the student or a peer. Once the marking is complete remember to commit the task to the mark book and tidy up the active tasks. If a student fails to submit the work, you can submit it for them.
Recording the marks
Once the task has been marked and committed, it will appear in the mark book for both teachers and students. Green tasks were completed on time. Orange tasks were submitted after the deadline. Red tasks were not completed. If the work was not set for the student it will appear as an X.
