Learning as Well as Assessment.

¶ … learning as well as assessment. Research has shown that assignments are correlated with academic success as well as in areas of time management and in a greater sense of accomplishment. (Anderman, 1998) Assignments allow students to practice new concepts and permit the teacher to see the work of the student in order to identify areas that need work or to revisit areas that the class has not mastered. (Corbin & Holt, 2002, p. 121) Assignments also provide for test preparation and promote long-term recall of the new material.

(Doyle, 1990) Being a student and being required to do assignments have gone hand in hand since most students began kindergarten. The problem is that not every student completes or turns in their assignments on time. (Mitchell & Salsbury, 2002, p. 45) From the start of formal education until the present, teachers have often struggled with students not handing in assignments on time.

Although formal education has existed for well over a hundred years, there is still no solid consensus as to what works best to motivate high school students to do their work. (Alderman, 2004, p. 279) Many efforts have been made to encourage handing in assignments, from rewards like candy to giving only half credit or zeroes for late work. (Hong & Milgram, 2000, p. 120) at Central Florida High School, missing work has become a major problem and is deeply affecting our failure rates, dropout rates, and increasing student apathy towards assignments.

The researcher conducted a brief survey to find out how five different teachers in the same department handled late work. The five teachers questioned provided four different answers. Two stated their students received only half credit for late work. The researcher then asked those same five teachers if their own university instructors had ever recommended a method of handling student late work. The answer was "no" - none had ever been given any insight into the problem of late assignments.

Teachers have been forced to come up with their own ways and to experiment with what works or simply do what another teacher does to make it simpler. The true history behind the 50% rule is that a teacher can give the penalty easily without having to use a calculator! As a result, one of the most common penalties for late work is giving a student a reduction of 50% on each assignment that is a day late or more.

(Corno, 1996) I have found no substantiating comparison outside the education world where only 50% credit is given for a product that is one day late. In construction, fines are incurred for a project that is late, but the road is not judged as half as good. If an office presentation is late, the employee may be reprimanded, written up, or even fired; but not given half credit for the presentation.

If a mortgage payment is late one day, you pay a late-fee, but you do not receive only the equivalent of half the payment; it would be illegal to enforce such a severe financial penalty. In real-life situations, people receive administrative penalties for late or missing work, not a reduction of credit for the work that is done. The second issue caused by the half or no credit for late work is removing the incentive to complete the work at all. (Pilcher, 1994, pp.

81-83) Why would a student spend time on an assignment in which their highest grade can be a maximum of a failing (50%)? Problem The problem is that too many students, especially those at risk, are not handing in their assignments. Missing assignments become zeros in the teachers' grade books and the grades of the students plummets. (Singer, 2003, pp. 204-207) With plummeting grades, come increased course failures which may contribute the sense of disengagement that can lead to a higher dropout rate. (Lindsay, 1995; Santisteban, Szapocznik, Perez-Vidal, Murray, Kurtines & Laperriere, 1996, p.

39) the current methods teachers are using to encourage work that is handed in completed and in a timely fashion is an academic penalty that is not congruent with the real-world workplace we are preparing them for. Reducing academic accomplishments due to lateness is a deterrent for students to hand it in at all. As educators, more must be done to encourage students to hand in work complete and on time without the use of academic penalties that are counterproductive to learning.

Historical Overview Central Florida High School has 2400 students in Orlando, Florida. The students have diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. The students are composed of: 33% White, 30% African-American, 29% Hispanic, 5% Asian, and 3% other. The school has existed for 31 years. The current failure rate (23% per semester) has been slowly increasing over that time period. Purpose The purpose of the study will be to reduce the number of assignments handed in and therefore improve students' feelings of accomplishment and overall grade point average.

The study will also try to determine if administrative penalties are more constructive than academic penalties in increasing timeliness and completion of school assignments. The study will also attempt to answer whether teachers and students prefer administrative penalties for missing academic work and what they like or dislike about that. This study is a practical one meant to increase student success and learning by testing a new method of punishment for noncompliance. Rarely do students fail classes if they have all of their assignments handed in on time.

The study will also measure the change in failing grades for the semester to see if there is a correlation with the overall change in the number of missing assignments. Assumptions There are four assumptions that will be made for this study.

They are (a) that all of the participants will be ethical and consistent throughout the study, (b) there will be enough teachers and students participating to provide for an appropriate sample that ensures valid data, - the subjects will be truthful in responding to the surveys administered during the study, (d) enough teachers will participate in the after-school study halls to make it a strong learning experience rather than a detention. Delimitations This study will be focused on Central Florida High School students.

To further increase the relevance of the study, it will only involve classrooms in which the core subjects of Math, English, Social Studies and Science will be taught. Although other subjects are taught at the school, the requirements of electives often involves commitments outside the school or using tools or equipment not readily available at home or in a study hall. This may pose a problem while executing the study and therefore these courses will not be involved. Summary Students often fail courses because of missing or late work.

The current systems that teachers are using at West Orange High School are not reaching all students. The current penalties for late or missing work are not congruent with what is observed in the adult work place for work that is missing or late. The study will test administrative penalties such as mandatory study halls for students that do not hand in work. The study will also try to establish a correlation between changes in the percentage of reduced zeros with the percentage of passing grades.

The study will also measure the response of the subjects, both students and teachers, of administrative penalties compared to academic penalties. The next chapter will discuss the feelings and opinions of students and teachers on the current academic penalty system and whether they feel it is effective and what changes they feel might make it more effective. Chapter 2 Review of the Literature The problem of late assignments is not easily solved. Many students will submit work beyond its due date despite severe academic penalties such as half credit.

For many more, the threat of half credit is a disincentive to complete the assignment at all, a fact that leads to unnecessary zeros, and to a further falling behind academically. Failure in one class may cause a student to lose interest in other classes. Poor academic performance can equal a loss of desire to achieve, or even to try. The young man or young woman may end his or her school career as a dropout. Academic penalties are not the answer.

We must understand the problem in order to combat it. Traditionally, teachers have attacked the problem of late assignments by providing a clear disincentive to turn in work late. Overdue work would automatically receive a significantly lower grade than on time work, regardless of student effort or achievement. Most commonly, the grade given would equal to fifty percent of that awarded for timely work; the fifty percent figure being chosen not for any supposed instructional benefit to the pupil, but because it was easiest for the teacher to calculate.

To impose a rule solely for the instructor's convenience violates one of the classic precepts of education: the direction of classroom experience so as to enable students to achieve their learning goals. (Singer, 2003, p. 36) Education should be a constructive process. Palinscar states that the teacher must assume an active and directive role by establishing the pace, content, and goals of the lesson. (Palincsar, 1998) Byra also described such a process of "task progression" through which content is broken down and sequenced into meaningful learning experiences.

(Byra, 2004) the lesson learned from receiving fifty percent credit on a late assignment is not necessarily the lesson intended. Each step in the academic process contributes to the learning process. An assignment is not merely research. It is not merely a grade. It is the sum total of the student's entire experience vis-a-vis that experience. (Bailey, Hughes & Moore, 2004, p. 32) a student who receives a grade of fifty percent because he or she completed an assignment late sees that arbitrary judgment of his or her work as a "lesson" too.

Studies show that the difficulty encountered in such a task-request approach (i.e. The completion of the assignment followed by the receipt of a fifty percent grade) is viewed as an arbitrary situational cue - one that tends to produce a pattern of short cut behaviors with a tendency toward low organization. (Lehtinen, 1995, p. 26) a primary aim of assignment completion becomes the avoidance of academic penalties. Students lose sight of the real purpose of the assignments, thus losing the motivation necessary to complete work on time. (Evertson & Smithey, 2000, p.

294) the muddling of purpose carries over into other spheres of life, potentially affecting the young man or woman's future performance in the workplace. A common complaint in regard to young workers is that they do not seem to understand how to behave at work, have no work ethic, and do not do know what is expected of them. (Rhoder & French, 1999, p. 534) Clarity of purpose is especially important in today's school environment. Like Central Florida High School, many American school populations are increasingly diverse.

Students come from a variety of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. Students' perceptions of their teachers are as important as their understanding of basic academic facts and concepts. African-American students often feel they are not being given the same consideration as white students, that they learn little or nothing during their four years in high school.

(Banks, 2005) to illustrate the point that school exercises should contain meaningful lessons, Jessie Singer and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard devised an experiment in which high school seniors would push the boundaries of literary exploration by devising their own writing projects. (Singer & Hubbard, 2002) Students were instructed to write about their passions: clothing, animals, children, comic books, and so forth. The lesson that these two educators learned from this experience was that students put more effort into projects that are meaningful to them.

(Singer & Hubbard, 2002) the project also enabled students to seen the relationship between a basic skill i.e. writing, and things of great personal interest to them beyond the classroom door. The relationship between the material learned in school, and the skills and procedures necessary to acquire that information can be shown in many other ways, as well. Murata found that blocked classes could create close-knit units out of a large and unwieldy, ethnically and racially diverse student population.

Block (or blocked) classes group classes according to common themes, thereby forming a single larger course or program. Studies have shown that this integration of material across disciplinary lines serves to increase student achievement, enhance critical thinking skills, and improve the overall atmosphere of the school while fostering a collaborative style of both learning and teaching and, importantly, a more diverse, inclusive, and pertinent curriculum enhancement that encourages students to think and learn for themselves (Weller & McLeskey, 2000, p.

209) High schools that have adopted the block class system have seen a rise in graduation rates a lessening of instances requiring disciplinary action. (Queen, 2000, p. 214) The concept raises academic performance levels while seamlessly providing students with everyday examples of cooperative problem solving, personal and joint responsibility, and mutual understanding.

The group ethos engendered by the block class program permits professionals and students from diverse backgrounds, and with a wide range of different knowledge and life experience, to come together to offer emotional support, and to design behavioral systems that are more in tune with the real needs of the school community. (Vitello & Mithaug, 1998, p. 49) Properly constructed behavioral systems eliminate many of the barriers to learning that can be erected when discipline is poor or lacking. The group approach teaches culturally-sensitive pro-social skills.

(Utley, Kozleski, Smith & Draper, 2002) Students learn to respect the behavior and opinions of others, and hopefully, to understand why different individuals act and think as they do. The individual assignments that make up the academic work of the school year reflect these broader aims of preparing students for the real world. Deadlines tell students that work cannot always been done at one's own pace; that the needs of others must frequently be taken into consideration.

Assigning due dates to homework and papers gives young women and men an opportunity to learn to budget their time. Correct allocation of limited time and resources involves separating the important from the unimportant, and the essential from the inessential. The student is as much researching the skill of research, as she or he is digging out new facts. Getting things done on time can also include learning the skill of working well with others, and understanding those individuals' needs and constraints.

It requires a sharing of resources and an evaluation of talents. Students must also be able to identify negative behaviors; to comprehend situations and ways of thinking that stand as barriers to the achievement of desired goals. They must be able to recognize ideas and prejudices that are unhelpful, and aid others in doing the same. These are the "hidden purposes" of any assignment. Joined together with the academic aims of the work, they provide a complete life lesson. Penalties for late assignments must respect these goals.

At Central Florida High School, late assignments commonly suffer an academic penalty of fifty percent. Regardless of the quality of their work, the effort which they put in to the assignment, or any of the other aims of the assigned work, students' grades are cut in half if their work is late. And since sixty five percent is passing, even a perfect paper receives a failing grade if it is late. This kind of academic penalty does not reward students for anything other than being on time.

It punishes untimely effort, and denigrates all the other possible lessons of an assignment. Students who do not complete an assignment by the date it is due have little incentive to continue working on the assignment. Students who might be late with an assignment are encouraged to rush, to hand in sloppy and inaccurate work just to stay on schedule. The fifty percent figure is arbitrary and does not teach students the importance of weighing consequences and making value judgments.

Teachers adopted the late mark because it was easy to figure out - just divide the on time grade in half and you are done - "easiest is best" - not usually the lesson we want to teach our children. Administrative penalties offer an alternative to academic markdowns. Students who turn in homework and papers late can be made to attend a study hall. The purpose of the study hall would be one of further academic enrichment, and more of the other core values the school aspires to teach.

Students would have to use their own free time to fulfill the study hall commitment, so it would still be a penalty. But it would be a penalty with many positive purposes, corrective more than proscriptive. Students no longer would see their hard work reduced to failure simply because they missed a deadline. They would be able to focus on the real needs and aims of their assignments.

Students who do not budget their time correctly can learn valuable lessons about how long it takes to perform research, how to arrange constructive meetings for group work, how to overcome problems with planning out projects - deciding hat is really important or necessary, and eliminating non-essential elements, etc. Those who do not finish assignments on time will have an incentive to continue working and complete the assignment to the best.