Instead of simply giving homework
that has only a vague pedagogical
focus, one approach to helping your students learn is to break this nebulous
category of assignments into two different types of assignments with
different pedagogical functions:
- Learning/tutorial assignments provide your students' first experience with new material, and are intended to walk students through new concepts and procedures.
- Skills practice assignments follow learning/tutorial assignments, and let your students apply new concepts and procedures. Skills practice assignments can provide an early indicator of areas that students are having difficulty with.
Learning/Tutorial Assignments
Use learning/tutorial assignments to introduce your students to new material. These assignments should:
- Enable learning tools like hints, tutorials, and Practice Another Version.
- Allow 5-10 submissions to give students ample opportunity to rework problems as they learn.
- Not use any automatic bonus or penalty points.
- Have a low impact to your students' overall grade.
Learning/tutorial assignments should include tutorials when possible; to locate questions that have tutorials, use Question Search in the Question Browser and type <tutorial in the Question box.
To implement this use case, see the following topics:
Skills Practice Assignments
Use skills practice assignments to let your students apply new concepts and procedures and to gauge their comprehension of material before moving on to other topics in class. These assignments should:
- Not allow learning tools like hints, tutorials, and Practice Another Version until all submissions are used.
- After all submissions are used, enable Practice Another Version to let students practice material that they don't yet understand.
- Allow 3 submissions.
- Deduct 1/3 of the point value for each submission used after the first one. This gives your students an incentive to think carefully about each response before submitting it.
- Have a higher impact on your students' overall grade than tutorial/practice assignments.
To implement this use case, see the following topics: