You know what it is - that type of studying that you wish all your students would do more. How can we put that into our assignments?

Claire is excited about her homework philosophy that 1) has very clear goals laid out for students, and 2) provides explicit scaffolding for how to get there, with 3) loads of practice problems. However, there are aspects of her assignment that don’t encourage the students to make full use of the scaffolding and knowledge of the goal. Here she and Ruth brainstorm solutions to that.

It’s really important to Ruth for the students to practice laying out the problem and have a system for approaching new problems. So she has a smaller number of problems assigned, she grades for methodology, and she supplements that with suggesting other problems from the book for even more practice. However, this isn’t scalable to large classes, so she and Claire brainstorm solutions to that. 

They refer to Specifications Grading, which they discuss in detail in Episode 124.

What do you like in homework assignments? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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