How to motivate students to complete low-point homework?

Question

I teach a course consisting of about 50 assignments. These include readings, many short writing assignments, and group projects. Additionally, students complete 2 large projects as the mid-term and final, entirely covering all of the material.

I noticed many students skipped lots of homework. Some skipped 6 weeks of work completely. I assumed the workload was too high, but I surveyed those who did the work and nobody reported spending more than 2-3 hours per week. Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low value, they did not bother to complete the work. These students all did very poorly on the final.

My supervisor will not be happy to find that I am failing 25% of the students. For future terms, how can I motivate students to complete everything?

Answer 1

Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low value, they did not bother to complete the work. These students all did very poorly on the final.

One important way to combat this attitude is to show the actual statistics from the course you just completed.

"Here is the distribution of homework completion across last semester's course. And here is the distribution of final course grades. Notice that every student who completed less than XXX% of the homework failed the course."

Repeat this exercise after every midterm, showing similar statistics for the current class. "See, here is the distribution of homework completion so far, and here is the distribution of midterm grades. Notice that every student who completed less than XXX% of the homework failed the midterm, which is completely consistent with last semester."

In other words: "I am not bluffing."

If you want to be even more direct, you can announce in your syllabus that anyone not completing XXX% of the homework automatically fails the course, regardless of their performance on the final exam. Be sure to read this sentence out loud in class on the first day.

Of course, you also need some carrots to go with the stick. The homework should not only be useful, but also interesting. The students should have access to any resources they need to master the homework material, including rapid and useful feedback. The homework should be realistically tuned to the skill and maturity levels of the students, and you should carefully discuss your expectations with instructors of any prerequisite courses.

My supervisor will not be happy to find that I am failing 25% of the students.

I assume you mentioned the abysmal homework completion rate to your supervisor as soon as you noticed it, which was relatively early in the semester. Right? So how did your supervisor respond?

Answer 2

Taking

Some students had determined that each assignment had such a low value, they did not bother to complete the work.

serious, it's tempting to suggest that you assign exactly the same work for exactly the same fraction of the course credit, but packaged into a smaller number of assignments so that each assignment looks more important to them.

But there are two issues:

• Frequent feedback is often alleged to be good for student learning, and your many small assignments support that while fewer large assignments do not.

• I'm also with the others: students who can't figure out that they have to do a large fraction of these assignments to pass are unlikely to be very successful no matter what you do for them.

So, perhaps you should just check progress at some early point in the course and lets the slackers know that they are on the road to poor grades if they don't shape up.

Answer 3

I typically make homework 40% of the course grade and divide the remaining points among midterm, final, and class participation. Then, on the first day, I tell students that they cannot pass the course without doing at least most of the homework.

I do not assign grades to reading assignments; instead, I make an assignment that can be assessed, but that cannot readily be completed without having done the assigned reading.

In a 16-week semester, I might have ten graded assignments, but each one will have multiple parts, so the students do perhaps 50 things, but they perceive that they have ten assignments, each worth perhaps four course points. I also require students to attempt every part of an assignment in order to receive any credit. In other words, half-done means not graded.

Answer 4

Sure, it is for their own good to do it. But frankly, college students are too immature to realize it, and even the ones who do realize it have to fight with very strong procrastination motivators. You can't expect them to deliver this kind of stuff based on internal motivation only, they don't have it.

If it is your goal to get them to pass, you have to give them external motivation here. The usual method is to make homework obligatory.

The idea behind it is simple. Anybody who gets less than 80% of the possible points on homework assignments is not allowed to take the final. If you want to be mild, or the homework is very tough, set a lower target in percent. If you want to include very interesting but very hard problems in the homework, mark them as "optional" and don't make them count towards the required points.

This also has the advantage (from a grader's perspective) that students who cannot muster the dilligence to achieve 80% correctness when working in a relaxed environment with little time pressure and with the help of their friends, their textbooks and the Internet, will not be present at the real written exam where they are only going to waste your time. But it also makes them learn for the homework, spaced over the semester, so the students who have the intelligence to beat the exam but procrastinate until the last two days to learn without deadlines are actually learning well and get their grade based on solid knowledge, instead of passing on bulimia learning or plainly failing.

You can alternatively declare a number of homework sheets which needs to be turned in. E.g. if there are 12 homework assignments for the semester, you can say that they need to turn in at least 10 to be allowed to take the exam. But this is more problematic - what do you do with students who turn in an empty sheet? The percentage system works, I have seen it employed by many departments at two different universities. I have been exposed to it on both sides, as a student and as a teaching assistant/grader. It is well accepted by students and staff alike, it is perceived as fair, and it works.

You will probably have some problems championing it, both from students and faculty, but once you get it established, everybody benefits.

Answer 5

Whether it's appropriate or inappropriate to fail 25% of your students depends on context. If this is a community college algebra course, then a 75% pass rate is insanely high, and would probably indicate that your standards are not high enough.

In general, it's not your job to motivate your students, nor is it your job to convince them to take a less immature attitude toward their own education. The fact that you assigned the homework put them on notice that you considered it necessary for them to do it in order to learn the material.

Answer 6

I tell the students that two exam questions will come from the homework: one exactly as it was on the homework, and one with only small changes. Doing all the homework is like getting one question on the midterm/final for free.

In class, I mention that usually the one that ends up on the exam with no changes is whichever one the fewest people turned in. Not always, but usually.

Added bonus: it seems to cut down on cheating, probably because if all you do is copy someone else's program, then you don't remember it well enough to reproduce it on the exam.

Answer 7

Make them worth more! You can do this by shifting more points onto them, or, maybe, by having less than 50 of them for what is presumably a 14 or 15 week semester.

Answer 8

I'm not an educator, but I have some experience on the matter of a course not engaging students enough to motivate them (I was one of those students).

I know I shouldn't place all the blame on the course material nor the instructor, but I cannot help but feel that if I failed sooner, I wouldn't have had to "suffer" as long as I did, hanging on to a diminishing sense of hope.

In my highschool, assignments were mandatory, you'd get punishment for not handing homework on time in addition to 0 marks, for disrespecting your teacher. However, the "freedom" I experienced immediately after entering university was too much for me to handle, and not handing in assignments was merely the first thing "to do" on my list of rebelliousness.

Different people handle situations differently, so I don't think having a blanket set of rules is good enough to handle all situations. I believe that each student should be treated according to their needs, but obviously that's a huge amount of resource needed, and is definitely not feasible... So I think there should at least be some sort of way to help groups of students with similar struggles, e.g. bored of class because they know it already, not knowing how to prioritise their work and ending up not finishing anything...etc.

Lastly regarding OP's question, my best advice right now is for the instructor to set aside some time to talk to their student's 1-to-1, at least once in a semester, before or after midterms (I'd say before is better, so they become more motivated for midterms). Student's who want to learn, will learn, but sometimes they just want to know that someone cares... a short chat (10min?) will let them feel that you care (whether you do or not... is another matter lol) And if that person didn't need a "pep talk", you can use it to learn from your students; yes, teachers should learn from their students as well, sometimes they have the brilliant ideas you could use.

Answer 9

First, I think it's important to note a difference between external motivation (carrot + stick) and intrinsic motivation (pride in the work + knowledge that it will help). External motivation can increase completion rates in your class, but has been shown to decrease intrinsic motivation so it may have negative aftereffects. Thus, I would try to avoid solutions such as competitions (which have also been shown to actually have a negative effect for girls)

I'm a strong advocate of fostering pride in the work itself. This can be done with 1 on 1 chats as mentioned by Populous, and if there is time, then I would recommend that in addition to the below advice.

As mentioned in dmckee's answer. Frequency of feedback can be an important factor in education, including motivation. When assignments are returned with comments and in a timely manner the students feel that the instructor or grader cares about their work. This support can foster intrinsic motivation. Conversely, when assignments are returned with no comments, returned late, or never returned at all, students can be strongly demotivated.

I know this both from personal teaching (and student) experience and literature on intrinsic motivation.

Also I'd like to make a few comments on jeffE's answer but don't have the reputation:

Statistics may be motivating for the students that understand them in some situations. However, often the simple statistics won't show what you'd like; the highest scoring students may have low homework completion rates because they already know the material and find the homework boring. I know, I personally didn't do a single homework assignment in Geometry, Algebra II, or Pre-Calc, but was the school winner for most of the math competitions in my High School. This is especially true in classes that aren't tracked where there can be a very large variation of abilities. Looking at the test grades vs. homework completion of an inner city public school Algebra 1 class shows a negative correlation. Trying to explain the confounding variables to a class that's not proficient in statistics is a futile exercise, and if they've made it to the point where they are proficient in statistics then odds are they've already learned to be self motivated.

Answer 10

The best way to motivate students in this regard is to create some form of competition.

Post the grades of the top 5 or 10 students after each assignment. If they choose, you don't have to publish their names but only their numbers.

Update the statistics after each assignment deadline and offer bonus points for finishing in certain positions (e.g. 1st places gets a bonus 10 points etc).

The atmosphere in the class will change quickly.

Answer 11

First of all, I'm disappointed that you used the word "fail," which is a reflexive verb, rather than "flunk," which is the correct word to use.

You didn't state what level (college, elementary, etc) you're teaching. For very young kids, I would simply send notes home saying something like "Your child didn't complete last nite/week's assignment. Please make sure he completes it by XX date." For high school and above, my view is that they can dang well sink or swim on their own. If they don't understand that the point of each assignment is to learn something (not to get a grade on it), then they're lost to the world. It shouldn't be your job to babysit them.

If you have concerns about your supervisor's opinion of your teaching methods, the appropriate thing to do is talk with him a month or so into the term, not after the finals.

And finally, a personal viewpoint, but bolstered with a lot of reports from teachers and observations from other parents: groups projects are crap. They've always been crap, and always will be crap. They invariably end up with a few strong players whose efforts are not properly rewarded because the overall project's quality suffers from the slackers or incompetents in the group. School is not military training camp (where it might be justifiable to grade the group on getting everyone safely thru the course).