Homework? To what end?

Is homework necessary to deliver the AP Statistics curriculum?

This week, my class will meet four times and the students have four homework assignments (see below) that they should work on prior to each class. I expect that they should spend 30 to 45 minutes on each assignment. So, I am asking my students to spend around six hours this week on AP Statistics. And this is a fairly typical week. We have about 31 weeks total from August until May for the students to prepare for the exam (vacation weeks excluded). So, that works out to about 186 hours of preparation for a 3 hour exam.

The AP courses are supposed to be college courses. Yet, we have far more class meetings than any college course I ever took. And the course is spread out over a year rather than a semester. My college courses met for 50 minutes, three times a week, over about fourteen weeks (though it may have been fewer than that). If we assume that a one-hour assignment accompanies each class meeting, then that would work out to around 77 hours of study in a semester. We should probably round that up as that does not account for projects or papers. So, let’s say 90 hours.

How is it that a college course expects a student to learn the same material in roughly half the time as a high school student?

Is homework necessary?

I would like to perform an experiment to investigate this question further. That just does not seem practical, or maybe ethical is a better choice of words.

If I were to eliminate homework altogether, my students would still have about 103 hours of preparation time which should exceed that of any college student. Add in another 20 hours maybe for project work and get a total of 123 hours which would be about 33% more than a college student. That seems like a more appropriate balance. Especially when you figure that the course would be delivered over twice the number of weeks allowing for the work to be presented in smaller chunks, and thus more easily digested.

In my mind, this should be feasible. If the AP Statistics course truly is a college course, that is. My class consists of eleven twelfth graders and two juniors. The twelfth graders are six months away from taking college courses. Do we really expect to be preparing them for college if the transition is so sharp?

The Weekly Menu

This semester, I have started serving something new in AP Statistics: the Weekly Menu. (Click here to see the Weekly Menu for this week.)

After each class meeting, the Chefs du Jour are expected to add one note taken from class. That note can be anything the student thinks is useful or important to remember. Other students in the class can see the notes posted by their classmates and add to them or even edit them. The Topics du Jour and the SMART Board notes for the day are also posted.

One goal of the Weekly Menu is to get students more invested and active in their learning. I am currently reading Jo Boaler’s book, Mathematical Mindsets, and it inspired me to be more intentional in trying to develop student self-awareness and responsibility. Dr. Boaler outlines Assessment for Learning (page 149 of this book) which “teaches students responsibility for their own learning.” I hope that by assigning some responsibility to students to fill in the document, they will take greater ownership of the course. There is also a level of peer accountability since all students will see what the Chefs have or have not added to the document.

Another goal of the Weekly Menu is to provide students the opportunity to reflect more often on what has been covered in class and what they should be learning.

Additionally, I am hopeful the Weekly Menu will serve as a good review tool. They can use it to review for tests and even for the final exam and AP exam. We will also use it to review what we did the previous day and use it to transition to the next topic.

Students can also use the Weekly Menu as another way to see what is coming up that week. And, if they miss class, the Weekly Menu can get an idea of what happened in class that day.

So far, the feedback I have gotten from students has been somewhat positive. We are only on the second week, so it is still in its infancy. Colleagues of mine like the idea, but ultimately it is meant to be a tool to help students, so it is their opinion that I will value most.

Trying to keep things fresh

Once upon a time, when I was a young, inexperienced teacher, the same-old-same-old was perfectly acceptable to me. Each day was much like the day before. The students learned and we moved forward at a reasonable pace and I was content.

Many grey hairs and many incarnations later, I am far from content. The same-old-same-old is boring. For both me and my students. It does not promote deep learning and it makes for less interesting teaching.

But, the world of AP Statistics sure does lend itself to routine. There is a wealth of material to cover and efficiency is necessary to get through all of it in time. So, many days in my classroom, I find one day feeling an awful lot like another and I see that glazed look in the students' eyes. As I wrote previously, the honeymoon is over and the students understand that they must grind.

But, that doesn't mean I have to give up. No, I won't do that. I am too hard-headed to give up and my expectations for myself would never allow it. Now that I have a better way to teach, I am not going to give it up. So, I constantly search for something new, something different.

As we have been going through the material, there do seem to be multiple processes that one ought to follow when answering certain kinds of AP exam free response questions. Want to compare two groups of a single quantitative variable? Don't forget your SOCS (shape, outliers, center, spread). Have a problem involving the Normal Model? There's a four-step process for that. Want to analyze a scatterplot? There are four characteristics to consider. Need to judge the quality of an experiment design? Be sure to consider the Three Principles.

Memorization is not something I like trying to teach. Yet, to be an efficient test-taker, there are advantages to having such processes down pat. To freshen up the class and at the same time help students remember these processes, I had them create posters. We will hang these posters in the class and they will serve as reminders of topics past. The students clearly enjoyed creating the posters. And I know that an enjoyable learning experience is one that is remembered. Memorization? Check.

Pictures of posters to follow...