STEM Course Design Series: After-Class Homework and Practice

Justin: Hey everyone, welcome to Recombinant Teaching. On this episode of the STEM course design series, we will tackle after class. So, what happens after you've given those lessons and you want to give students assignments to work on at home? We typically call this homework. So we'll explore this in different ways and how you can do that. As always, go back to the old episodes if you're just joining us now for the first time and catch up so we can get an overview of what is high structure course design early on in the episode series. We talked about learning objectives and learning outcomes, summative assessment. course schedule, syllabus design, and then we got into pre-class work, in-class active learning and lecturing in the last episode. And now we're talking again about after class. Okay. So there's a lot of things you can do after class and we'll talk about those in this episode with homework, draft assignments, practice quizzes, exams, other things you might think of. But the key thing as always is to build in a line, as we've been talking about. You wanna build on what happens before class, build on what happens during class. Think of it like a staircase, right? So before class, lower level, in class, higher level, after class, even a higher level. Everything is aligned and builds one after the other. As I talked about in the last episode, you wanna give lots of practice opportunities during class. And these are ideally practice opportunities so students can learn and fail from and fail safely, right? And learn from those mistakes. But all these practice opportunities will also help them do well on the after class assignments and then the downstream summative assessments, which will come later on, whether that's a weekly quiz or a midterm or a take-home group quiz or something like that. Okay, so remember, keep about that pre-class, in-class, after class staircase of alignment, and also with the after class, just like the pre-class and in-class, make sure everything is aligned to your learning objectives. Make sure everything's tied in tightly there. If something on an after class, if you have a quiz, homework type of question, some kind of numerical problem you want to ask, and you've never done anything like it, you've never even talked about that topic, well, it shouldn't be in there, right? Because it's not adjust, it doesn't tie to a learning objective. So make sure you remove that. Or you add that learning objective in. But again, like I talked about last episode, now you're adding in more stuff. So be careful with that. Okay, so different types of afterclass assignments that are very typical in STEM fields. first and foremost is homework. We'll talk about that. practice quizzes or exams, old stuff, that's also very common. And then maybe a little bit less common are draft assignments for different types of projects. And we'll we'll talk about that. Alright, homework first though. This is the bread and butter of STEM courses, whether it's intro bio or calc one. Moving all the way up through the ranks of higher physics and geosciences and chemistries, whatever engineering it might be, weekly homework or every other week homework is a very, very common approach to assessment for an afterclass. homework can be considered both formative and summative in a way. it can be considered formative because depending on how you do it, you might get feedback, you might get hints. it's more frequent, so you think of it as formative there. It's an assessment for learning, but it's also a little bit summative. Because you are expecting students to be able to do more at this point. It's summarizing a week or more of material. It's holding them a little bit more accountable than what would happen during class or before class. So it, you know, it can fall in both those buckets for sure. typically in STEM we do written homework, handwritten, or online homework these days. And it's probably gonna depend on your field. So if you're in a numerical problem-solving field, like an engineering course or a calculus or math course, you might do still more handwritten homework. You know, that's very common still. or you might use these online platforms. And that's those are very common in in the more basic sciences like chemistry, physics, biology, geosciences, but they are also common in in the math fields too. and in those cases, students would practice their, you know, do their numerical problem-solving work on their side on a piece of paper. And they would just type in their actual answers or pick from a options on the on the online program, which would tell them if they're correct or not. So there's different ways to do it. For me, I still do a mix of both. intra-bio, anatomy, and physiology, I use online platforms for my chemical engineering courses. One of them we do online platforms, one of them we still do handwritten problems. So, you know, it's it's a mix of all all approaches. the handwritten numerical problem I think is really, really important for skill development. for engineering or any science student for that matter, because you get to see the workflow. And so when students bring those those handwritten notes with them to office hours especially and I'm trying to help them and let's say, hey, I'm stuck on this homework problem, can you help me? And I look at their their notes, I look at their handwriting, and that's a really easy way for me to look into their brain in a way and see how they're solving things. quick aside, huge pet peeve here, is when I get students asking for help on these homework problems and all I see are numbers on the page. Like literally numbers. And you might think, well that's not a big deal. Like, no, no, it is. There's no units. Why are there no units? dimensional analysis, units canceling out are so important in engineering and in science. And if students don't do it, they're gonna get lost. So that's my first thing that I tell them all is please, please, please write your units. During class when I model problem solving approaches, I literally put my hands together and beg and pray to them, I say, please write your units out. And that will save so many problems that you're gonna have down the road. So try to foster those good problem solving skills during class. So that way when students are doing their homework, they will hopefully pick up on that. And in this one case, write down their units. It's a huge, huge problem. so yeah, but having the handwritten work, whether they you grade the handwritten work or just the final answer or a combination, whether it's again using an online platform or you literally turn in the pieces of paper and you grade them by hand. you're gonna have a variety of ways to do this. Nowadays with tools like GradeScope, I don't work for them by the way, but I love that product. you can scan in all of your handwritten homework problems or quiz problems or whatever from your students and then grade them online. Way, way, way, way, way better system. So check out tools like that. where you can have students submit a digital version or they turn in the paper to you and then you scan it version of their homework and that can help a lot with efficiencies for grading too. The online platforms too, those are nice because they typically give you hints in the moment. Students can check and see if they got it right right away and they can fix. So again that's why that's really formative because they can get feedback as they go. Whereas the handwritten version, they're probably not going to know for another week or so until you're done grading everything or if you're lucky you have TAs grading it. or graders. So that's gonna take some time. does it matter which one you do? That's a question you might want to ask yourself. Is am I better off if I give my students written homework versus online homework? the studies on this are kind of all over the place. Check out my book, this chapter on after class, you get a nice summary of them all. there's not one definitive study that shows one is better than the other. It really is a mixed bag. It it I so I'd say it depends on what you want out of the situation. Do you want students to have immediate feedback? Hence, multiple attempts, and for you, potentially automatically graded assignments, don't ignore that. That's a huge, huge potential time saver to have automatically graded work, especially when you have hundreds of students. When I taught UC Irvine, I had eight hundred and eighty students at one quarter for intra bio at one point, two sections of four forty. And yeah, we use online systems, so all eight hundred and eighty homeworks every week could be automatically graded. That That's not nothing to sniff at. That's a huge time saver. if it's good quality. So as our as our la as our episode on course schedule and selecting course materials when we talked about this, make sure those bells and whistles are worth it. So if you're having students pay for that, make sure they're they're worth it. And the the assessment items are good, the interactive assignment pieces are good. And if they're not, maybe build your own on your own LMS, because then it's quote unquote free. So no one's paying extra for that. So if you want that automatically graded capability on homework, Use your LMS if you don't want students to pay for a platform. Nothing wrong with that either. written homework though, again, you get to see students' thought processes, you get to see all their work, you get to see where they make potential errors and help them fix that. But that's a lot more time-intensive on the grading side. And you can do other options of like peer peer grading, peer assignments. and again, if you have some TA help, you can help with that too. There's also some AI tools coming out now that are designed to with for this in mind where there can be automatically grading of written work. I'm a little still a little leery of that. as I record this in July 2026. I don't think it's they're the best yet, but hey, over time they're only gonna get better. So that could be another option down the line where you do have AI assisted graded grading of homework. And you know if it's for formative development, if it's for helping students learn from mistakes, I don't think there's anything wrong with that to use AI to help you grade those. You know, if you're trying to use AI to grade really big projects and summative assessments and exams and critical thinking and and then maybe not there, right? But you know, for helping students fix mistakes and a energy balance problem in thermodynamics, and you got f 200 of those students in the AI is super accurate, yeah, something to consider. Something to consider for all of us as we're moving into this world. Okay, so I think the point though of homework, no matter how you do it, it is valuable. Homework does seem to be very strongly correlated with student performance. depending on the study, students actually like it. So it depends, I think, on how you do it and how often you do it. I like to do it every week. That's pretty typical in STEM courses, weekly homeworks. But again, the format up to you. Does it bring value? Absolutely, because it's giving students practice opportunities for those larger summative assessments. And so yeah, so I would definitely, definitely, definitely encourage you to to consider using homework in your class. You probably already do. But again, make sure it's aligned. Make sure it's tied back to your lessons, tied back to your learning objectives, and make sure it's doable. Don't give too much. That's another thing. You know, in our chemical engineering courses here at Mines, we typically give, you know, five to eight problems a week. It's not a lot. I mean, some of these problems can take a while. So, you know, actually that it could be a lot, but you know, five to eight a week, that's that's enough to cover what we did the last week. It's all they're all tied in the line to our learning objectives. They're all they're all represented by practice problems we did in class. So it's very doable. whereas I've heard other courses and other disciplines, they'll give upwards of you know 50, 60, 70 problems a week. Now these might be just be multiple choice, they're not, but still that's a lot of problems to get through. so be careful with quantity. Consider what do you actually need to cover, need to assign. students always want extra, of course. They always want extra practice problems. So if you can give extra practice problems or old practice problems, which we'll talk about next, that's really great for you to do. But don't expect students to have to do 20, 30, 40 numerical problems a week. that's just way too much. They got a lot of other stuff going on too. Okay. speaking of practice, practice quizzes, practice exams. So it's very common as well, I think, in STEM fields to assign last year's quiz or last year's exam as a practice opportunity. and this can be really, really revealing for students because it's giving them a authentic Matched assessment to what they might actually get in your class. So again, if you do a weekly quiz model like I do in my engineering courses, then last year's quiz, well, hey, that's a really good approximation of what's going to come this year. In terms not in terms of the content and what exact question, of course, but because I don't do that, I don't recycle questions like that. but in terms of format, style. length. So what I recommend to students, if I do that, I give them last week's last year's quiz as an assignment. And I actually tie it as part of the homework. So I make it part of the homework so the students do it because I think it's really important to do the practice quizzes, the old quizzes. I'll tell them, hey, set a timer for 15 minutes and see how you do. Put everything away, 15 minutes, see how you do. If you run out of time or you get stuck, that's okay. It's homework. You can open your stuff up and help you out, but simulate it, right? Especially early on in the course when students are getting used to the assessment style. Tell them to practice it. some students I know will actually go to the actual classroom and sit in their actual seat and do it for practice there. So they really simulate the experience, right? So keep that in mind. practice can quizzes and exams can be really helpful. There's a lot of literature on this, again, summarizing the book chapter on this topic on how effective they can be and why they're important. whether they're multiple choice old exams or numerical problem-solving quizzes, you're giving students chances to practice again. demonstrating their mastery on the object on the learning objectives that you assign to them. it also levels the playing field by giving out old stuff. So I don't give every single years of old quizzes because I think then it gets to be too many. But by giving students at least a couple, you're giving them chances to see what old quizzes are like. And this avoids, you know, them going, you know, the what was the old is it was it a meme? I don't even know. But you know, it's the the old thought of you know, students going to their local fraternity house and buying the old exams, right? I've heard rumors of certain s at certain universities there's like these magical Google Drive folders that you only certain students get access to. And if you remember the old Simpsons episode where the one up where Lisa starts cheating, she goes to Nelson who has a bunch of the old spelling tests in the in the upper tank of the toilet in the bathroom and she's able to buy one from him to cheat. We don't you can avoid that, right? So if you're giving students old practice quizzes, old exams, they get to see, they all get to see them. It's not just certain students who have them or who happen to have a friend in the class before who passed it on to them, right? So you're leveling the playing field by giving them the old stuff. and though so that's consider doing that too as a as another benefit of assigning practice quizzes and exams. There students always want to make their own practice too or want want more practice. Like I said, they always want more practice problems. So if you do have a bunch of quizzes and exams for them, There's always a validity check with what I'm gonna say here now, but you can either do this yourself or have your students do it and just hey upload a bunch of these to your favorite LLM and say, hey, can you make me some more? Here's here's what this guy does. Here's his style, here's his old quizzes and exams. Can you make me more that are similar like this? Right. And boom, there you go. Clyde, GPT, whatever will make you new more more of them immediately. again, you always gotta check the accuracy on these. It's getting better every day. So I feel a little less worried about this now than I did two years ago when I start first started experimenting with this. But but consider as for more practice, have your LLM tools help you out. There's I don't think there's anything wrong with that again, as long as you trust it and check it. And that is one thing to be sure. You can eat nowadays with all the different models, you can even have one model make you the quiz questions and then have another model check them for you to say, hey, are these accurate? Are the answers correct or not? Right. So there's there's some ways to cross across pollinate there to get some more practice because students always want more. questions. You can always have them write their own too, right? Have students write as as a homework assignment, have students write practi write real questions and then have them for practice in class or make consolidate the list to have students do them for practice or even tell them, hey, I'll I'll pick the two that I like the best and put them on the actual quiz or exam. Right. So there's a little incentive there to write some really good questions. Okay, last thing about after class are drafts. So depending on what kind of class you're teaching in STEM, you might have some kind of projects, you might have writing You might have lab work and we'll talk about that in the next episode. Labs, so I'll save lab report discussion for then. But let's say you have some kind of project or paper that students are working on or an oral presentation over the semester, you can have draft assignments due. So one of my summative assessments that I like to do is a health and wellness project for my anatomy and physiology class. This is an what I consider an authentic assessment because it's students actually taking a chance to learn about their own bodies and health and try to do something to make them better. So how it works is students will pick an intervention and pick something they want to measure. So as one example, I get this one a couple times a semester. some of the guys in the class want to get bigger biceps. So they want to add in some more upper body work, some bicep curls, some different weight training, resistance training, and then they just use a tape measure and they measure their bicep circumference, right? and then in the end though they have to put together a presentation, whether sometimes I've done it orally, written. Now I'm kinda landing on Canva flyers because they're fun and creative and you know, infographics are are are a thing. So they make a Canva flyer summarizing the results and how it ties into anatomy and physiology, what they're learning about. but they have drafts along the way. Okay, so along the way, students will submit a proposal for what they want to do, what their hypothesis is, what their intervention is. They submit a mid mid-course report on how it's going. I give them feedback along the way, and then at the end they have their their assignment. I could also add in a draft of the flyer if I wanted to. I don't do it, but right, but you can have drafts along the way. So you think about after class, the point is if you have writing assignments, presentation assignments, projects, portfolios, you can have things be due in smaller chunks. which I hope you're doing already. And if you're not, consider doing that. That way it's not just one big thing do at the end. You can build in peer review on that. You can build in instructor review, AI facilitated review and feedback. All this will help students develop that project or portfolio or assignment as they go. And again, there's drafts due maybe every week or every two weeks or every three weeks. So there's smaller chunks of after-class work there that can then ultimately build up together this one nice final project. And again, there's a lot of feedback built into that as you went. So consider that too, as another alternative of after-class assignments. Doesn't have to be purely content and skill-based, like homework or practice quizzes and exams. Could be more that independent project paper report presentation development, too. Okay. So, whatever you do with after class, again, make sure it's tied and aligned back to your learning objectives. Make sure that you use that staircase to build on what happens before class, during class, into the after class. And then it's also staircasing and aligning and preparing students for that summative assessment whenever that time comes. After class will be very valuable to you as long as you do it right. It's not overwhelming and it is worthwhile as always. Okay. So that's it for after class. And next episode, we'll talk a little bit more about how to use some of this model of high structure course design in other situations like labs, face-to-face, online, synchronous, asynchronous, field sessions, all these different formats. So we'll talk about that next time too. All right, until then, as always, let me know how I'm doing. Let me know if there's anything I can add to this series. If you have any comments or feedback, please do share with your colleagues. And have a great rest of your day, everybody. Happy teaching.