Flashblog - Homework grading a new way

I have been teaching Algebra 2 for over 10 years and have been through various methods of HW checks.  When I started, I checked homework everyday for correctness and entered the grades accordingly.  The policy was no late work, so students who didn't turn in work could do it for the learning but not for credit.  Of course students did not go back and do the work for no points.  The students that did the work, hand it in and received comments on their work didn't correct their work either.  This was a loss of learning possibilities, so I started requiring students to make corrections to their incorrect problems and handed back in to be checked.  Students were continuously handing work back in for a recheck.  This became extremely overwhelming for so many students and I had to keep going back to old solution keys and was grading all the time after school.

I tried just giving students credit for turning it in completed with work.  I didn't check the actual work, just counted up the problems that were completed fully.  Most students would turn in work for the lesson, but some would try to pass off an old assignment for credit fir the new assignment.  When it got to be time for the test.  Surprise!  Students who had done work and not checked it or copied their friends or turned in an old assignment performed poorly on the assessment.  So conferences went something like this..."Billy is doing great on his homework, but when he gets to the test he freezes and does poorly.  Billy is just not a good test taker."...and then I would have to reiterate that homework is not checked for correctness but for completeness.  I told them that their child needed to check the answers and correct their mistakes on their own before turning it in.  That didn't seem to work very well.

I wanted to be able to assess student learning without having students continually turn in their homework so I could grade their papers every night.  Students work better in my classroom when they get to work with peers of their choosing and ask me questions when they are stuck.  So my policy now is that students are to work in teams of 3 that they get to choose.  The team is responsible for helping its members learn the material and ask me if they have questions.  In order to receive credit for their work, each student needs to complete a one questions quiz on the material individually with me.  They will have 1.5-2 minutes to complete the problem.  If they get it wrong, we will talk about what went wrong and then they are sent back to relearn the material.  They are not allowed to quiz on the next material until the previous quiz has been passed.

This allows me to work with students individually, get to know what they need and allow students to learn responsibility for their learning and not just a piece of paper to hand in.