Undergraduate Homework Assignments that Achieve Desired Learning Outcomes

It is well-known that doing homework is an extremely common and useful tool for achieving student learning outcomes and for enabling the instructor’s formative assessment. Nevertheless, it is equally well-known that, in general, the students’ less-than-optimal approaches to completion of homework assignments diminish achievement of the desired learning outcomes that could be supported by this tool. This study proposes three different interventions to the traditional approach to homework which can effectively achieve student learning intended by practice in problem solving. The first approach uses an oral examination to determine the student’s grade on the homework rather than having the students turn in their homework for later grading. The second intervention is similar to the first one but involves the additional requirement of turning in the solved homework as usual. In the third approach, students are requested to work in groups of two or three. Each group’s assignment is different and a written solution is turned in for grading. These approaches are strongly supported by principles of how people learn. In order to measure the enhanced learning resulting from the experimental homework approaches, samples of previous year’s exams are given to the students and the performance of the study group is compared to that of the previous year’s classes. Furthermore, student reflections on those approaches compared to the traditional common homework style are collected and analyzed by an independent evaluator to document the impacts of homework innovations.