HOW TO SET OUTSTANDING HW

The ideal length of a task is approximately 20-25 mins. This amount of time is ideal because it's enough time for the student to get some momentum in their practice and their thinking, but importantly, not enough time to allow for the mind to wander, a natural consequence of working after a school day. Students, like teachers, experience exhaustion. 

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The age of the student then doesn't really matter. You may feel like the older students could handle more than this amount of time, but it is all relative. Older students are probably working with more intensity, and faster, so arrive at the same point of distraction as younger students generally around 25 mins. Besides this, tasks of this length are ideal to exploit the advantages of interleaving, a process where content is 'chunked' to assist the memory and to help develop the formation of mental schemas. 

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Before you set any work, make sure you know how much the students already have. If the ideal length of task is 20-25 minutes, we need to establish how many of these blocks a student can handle after school. To do so, consideration of the amount of time students actually have after school to dedicate to homework needs to be established. An effective homework policy is one that acknowledges the need for variation in life, and that allows for time to be spent on things unrelated to school.

 

The amount of time varies with age, and should only be 4 nights a week:

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- students in yr 7 and 8 - approximately 60 mins a night

- students in yr 10 & 11-  approximately 90 mins a night.

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Teachers should coordinate with one another so that students are not being overwhelmed with many assignments and projects at the same time (McNary et al., 2005; Patton, 1994). The consequences of overloading students  are clear: reduced performance in tasks, which reduces the validity of the task, as well as reduced well-being. Schedules were created to address this very issue, but as seen here, schedules have limitations, particularly in not being responsive to teaching and learning sequences, and therefore, not good examples of formative assessment. The most efficient solution to this is to have an online homework manager that can allow a teacher to set tasks in response to teaching sequences, and show a teacher how much work students already have, so as not to give students another task that would take them over the edge in terms of what they can mentally handle. Presently in the market, the only tool capable of this is The Homework Degrumbler, as illustrated opposite.