Setting independent homework is harder than it seems
The difficulty lies in the idea that unless students have secure knowledge of a topic, then asking them to extend their thinking on it will result in cognitive overload.
Homework that falls into the first category of independent work is handled in other sections in this website, here, and here, and here. This page will deal with the type of homework task that develops independent thinking.
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Firstly, we must decide if the task is going to be used for formative or summative assessment. If it is going to be formative, as most homework pieces are, ones that will allow us to infer from the results of the task what the next stages of teaching should be, then we must be sure that all the components that make up the task are secure. This is the only way we can expect students to be able to extend thinking based on the what essentially becomes a synthesis or amalgamation of the components. If the components aren't secure, and the students subsequently produce poor work, then it is impossible for us to make any valid inference about the result of the activity: we were wanting to judge the extended thinking, but we won't know if the students weren't able to produce quality thinking in general, or if the poor result was because some components weren't secure. This is why homework tasks are probably better suited to activities that isolate components of a larger domain of knowledge. That way you can precisely ascertain if there are gaps in the learning.
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Scenario: Take for example, asking students to complete an essay based on a novel. Generally, the purpose of such a task would be to ascertain the students' ability to understand how language is used to shape meaning. At GCSE level, such a task is incredibly complex, as it may involve having to synthesise what they know about the text, analyse language use and character development, provide an evaluation of language use and the author's handling of themes, and then articulate their ideas in a coherent and engaging manner. If the students produce poor responses, and don't indicate that they understand how language has been shaped by the author, unless you are positive that all the components were secure, it may not be easy to infer what the issue or issues are. The validity of the task, assessing for learning, is jeopardised. Daisy Christodoulou makes a superb case for rethinking the validity of tasks we set students in 'Making Good Progress', and it very much applies to the setting of independent type homework tasks.
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It is important to define what we mean by independent work. There are two ideas connected to it. Firstly, the notion that students undertake work without anyone else around, on their own. Secondly, the work is an extension or application of knowledge already taught, such as an essay or research project - a task that attempts to develop independent thinking about a topic. In either context, the capacity of working memory is key. If students are asked to process more novel (new) information than their working memory can handle, then they will experience cognitive overload. The result is that little learning will result, and often, if they can, students will outsource the learning to either a parent or the internet. Such a scenario draws attention to the validity of the task: is it achieving what you want from it, is it appropraiate assessment for learning?
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This is one of the main criticisms of discovery learning and project based learning. The openness of such approaches tend to make the learning less efficient as the multiple access points often lead to cognitive overload. However, these approaches, which lend themselves well to independent thinking activities are very powerful if there is a secure base level of knowledge about a topic, if the student has moved away from being a novice, and has become more expert. The above table illustrates the differences in capabilities between the two stages of knowledge acquisition. The research below covers the theory extensively.
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20 - 30 min tasks
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Make them formative assessments
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Ensure prior knowledge is secure: expert status is achieved
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Precise instructions
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Modelled example to begin
TIPS FOR SETTING SUCCESSFUL INDEPENDENT TASKS
If the independent homework task is designed to be summative, the same process of ensuring the validity of the assessment is essential. Again, if we take the example of the essay, or perhaps the completion of a portfolio, we will be looking for different things from the task. We will be looking to see if we can infer from the result that the student has a good grasp of what we've been teaching, that we could confidently say that they are eligible to advance to the next level. But bear in mind that the summative assessment won't give you any precise idea about how to proceed in the next stages of teaching (unless the components are easily isolated). This is largely why summative assessment tasks are rarely designed as homework tasks.
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It almost can't be reiterated enough: the likelihood of success in independent thinking tasks relies solely on the amount of prior knowledge students have.