How to incentivize homework without grading it

This is an excerpt from our new podcast, Accelerated Physics. It’s a podcast where we talk physics and math education: how to improve your learning, your teaching and how to connect that material to the big ideas in physics. You can access the podcast feed here.

First off. I should say that I’m not a huge fan of compulsory homework. Homework largely, is for practice. It’s for learning, and learning is messy. And messy practice is often... well... a mess. It’s annoying for the TA’s to grade, it’s annoying for the students to turn in. Quizzes - even daily quizzes - are at least a performance activity. Students are primed to think of it that way. Homework can often just get sloppy.

And for first or second year physics or mathematics courses it probably should be.

Compulsory homework also motivates students to only do problems once. And some problems are probably worth doing multiple times. It’s self-defeating all around.

So how do you get the notoriously short-time-horizon motivated high school and college students to do their homework?

A quiz. Yup. Although a different kind of quiz. Let me explain.

The Open Homework Quiz

You can incentivize students to do their homework - without requiring it - using the “open homework” quiz. The idea comes from my first physics class ever: undergraduate mechanics! This one is from another professor named Tom, this one, Tom Gramila.

Gramila’s idea was simple. Homework was optional. Each week in recitation, we had a quiz. The quiz was closed book, but open homework. These special open-homework quizzes were designed with two principles in mind.

First, the were conspicuously similar to the homework problems.

Second, there were way too many problems on a given quiz for someone to do them from scratch.

So, not only did the homework serve as an aid to the quizzes, the quizzes were almost impossible to do without them! How’s that for an incentive?

Why Open Homework?

That’s a fun idea right? Gramila was full of fun ideas. He’s the kind of guy who’d soak his chalkboard erases in isopropyl alcohol before each lecture to make sure the chalkboards were continuously pristine. When he AC went out in his lab, he filled baking trays with liquid nitrogen. THIS GUY is a physicist.

That’s what physicist is all about. Solving problems. Now, aside from incentivizing the students to actually learn from the their homework, what other benefits does this approach have?

First, quizzes or exams employing this technique can be less nerve-wracking for students. Going in prepared with homework they know well is akin to the well-curated formula sheet.

That said, the process is novel, and students likely won’t be familiar with it. If you’re going to employ it in the context of an exam, having a few higher-stakes quizzes that are also open homework will help get students accustomed to this style of examination. Especially in a timed exam, students can easily get mired digging through their notes.

The drawback of any kind of open-homework or open-reference materials examination is a masking of the assessment for creative problem solving. With familiar examples worked out, the students may just default to pattern matching, rather than actually applying knowledge of physics. Of course, good examination design can get around that. Not all questions need to match the pattern of the homework problems, but most of them probably should.

Ultimately, Gramila’s open homework technique is a means to incentivize deliberate practice. Really, it’s that practice that’s the key to learning physics.