Homework approaches in secondary school

[Stevie77]

I'm genuinely interested to hear about your child's secondary school approach to homework.

My son started Year 7 in Sept. I also have a Year 11 child in a different school. My son's school uses Seneca and Mathswatch as their main platforms for homework, with other work being on Google Suite, or other platforms. But all on digital platforms.

I've reached out to school (they have a dedicated Yr 7 transition lead) querying it as it seems like the reliance on an automated platforms leads to a lighter-touch approach to homework overall. I can see how it is convenient for teachers not having to mark books, but I am concerned about the lack of written homework, lack of personalised feedback, no teacher-guided assessment or the chance to meaningfully learn from mistakes etc. I also don't think that Seneca alone provides the level of academic challenge or the development of independent study skills needed further down the line. I also don't think it promotes focused work, as the system is really distracting - you get celebratory pop-up memes when you answer correctly, when you type an answer it automatically completes the end of the word for you etc. It seems like a useful for revision and quizzing, but for all homework?

School have so far replied reinforcing (expected, I guess) this school-wide approach, stating that they find Seneca to be a highly effective, interactive online platform that supports learning and revision. They say they also utilise a Seneca Plus model, where while they have a core approach, individual faculties incorporate specific independent learning strategies tailored to their subject area.

So, am I right to be concerned? I can't see how this approach prepares the students for what sitting GCSEs and the level of studying needed in the coming yars - which I am seeing with my older child now. Assuming I am correct in my concerns, where else can I take this next? Governors? Happy to be told I'm wrong!

In case you are not joking……

My marking informs my teaching. Marking meaningful work produced by my students helps me to see what they have understood, gauge the progress they are making, see what I need to tweak next time I teach them, finely adjusting my pedagogy to meet them where they are. I’m not sure ai can do that as well as me yet, certainly not in my subject which is subjective and requires interpretation of a mark scheme.

Year 7 parent here. For us the Seneca and online Maths homework works mostly OK, though DS has a tendency to guess and click again rather than slow down and work things out when the app shows something as wrong.

I am still traumatised though by last weekend's RE homework (make a poster about "Who is God?"). DS is probably ADHD and open ended and creative tasks result in untold levels of procrastination and stress. 6 hours of tantrumming later he finally produced a very basic piece of work that I suspect hit none of the RE teacher's aims. However we don't know as she never bothered to take them in during the lesson, let alone give feedback 🙄

I'm only half joking tbh. Children of today will be living in the world of AI, they absolutely have to learn how to use this tool productively, otherwise they will be unemployable (unless going into manual occupations like physio/massage etc).

I understand teachers of today are too old to adapt to this so yes, I was hinting at that. However, you also mentioned google and it struck me as being out of touch with reality so I was mostly interested in your reply to that but you decided not to bother :) AI is only emerging even though really fast, but google has been here for ages but you somehow still see it as something "not meaningful"? 🤔

BTW I'm not saying the current way of using AI by pupils is anything productive, it is of course very stupid to copy and paste its output, but pupils will absolutely need to learn how to use it for research or solving difficult tasks - the same way people had to learn to fine tune their google search to find better info. Even if I search within google scholar, a very narrow subset of web sites, the output will be very different depending on the exact wording of the search.

Using AI to mark homework that kids have done using AI....I'm not sure anyone learns anything here.

Not at the moment, of course. And it won't happen with the approach "they used google or AI hence it's not meaningful".

I use google scholar quite often for my own "homework". A friend of mine who knows absolutely nothing about structural engineering used AI to find out and better understand the possible solutions to a very serious problem with a building that specialists refused to address. Without AI, they would have been left helpless.

If AI was used in this way in schools, and presented not as an end result but as a tool for further analysis, children would be learning how to use it productively.

That's probably a task for the next generation of teachers though. Or parents if the teachers are too busy doing something else.

Or we could use proper resources that we know aren't going to spout bullshit randomly?

No, you'd rather need to learn and develop critical thinking to be able to distinguish bullshit from mediocre common knowledge info from some valuable results. Just like in the above example of researching engineering info - what would be "proper resources" in that case?

"Proper resources" will never be changing and adapting fast enough so you can't rely on them anymore. If I need some info on the cutting edge neuroscience research, I won't find it in peer reviewed journals as their publishing cycle is too long. However, I can find preliminary articles in other sources but I have to know what to look for and yes, how to spot bullshit. Without AI, I would be spending days sifting through hundreds of web sites just to gather initial info.

We researched an obscure composer with DC recently, google search returned Wiki and other sources that copy pasted Wiki, AI basically did the same but there was something in AI output, literally a single phrase that led me to a web site with much more detailed and interesting info. That web site was not in google search results, neither it was mentioned in AI sources, but if you understand how to fine tune your search based on the initial AI output, you will more likely find what you need.

Calling this work "meaningless" is bizarre to me. Of course it's nothing groundbreaking, we're not going to find the cure for all types of cancer as AI can only search what human being have already done and published on the web, but it can be very helpful already.

You know that AI hallucinates, right?

@Ubertomusicsorry, I’m not following? I haven’t mentioned Google once, maybe you are getting me confused with someone else?

Oh yes, sorry it was @Postapocalypticcowgirl
Human beings are prone to careless mistakes 😂

Carelessness and abject rudeness saying I hadn’t bothered replying about a point I had never made……

I apologised for my mistake which is not being rude, but yes, human being also like to take offence if they have nothing productive to add to the debate.

Sorry you feel so threatened in your position of teaching authority by the use of AI that you feel like taking offence from strangers on the internet. AI use in learning is inevitable though, no matter what I say or don't say to you.

This is a massive reach. I think you are overestimating your impact on me….

I know AI use is inevitable and I can see it has a place in for example, research, summarising, editing, identifying themes and trends, reformulating ideas, analysing data. I use it for many aspects of my own work.

But teenagers are passing off work (in my subject, creative writing, persuasive writing, analytical essays) generated by AI as their own, sometimes in high stakes situations, such as NEA. This doesn’t threaten teachers’ authority, but it puts us in a very difficult position as we can be accused of malpractice if we don’t spot it and it is increasingly difficult to spot. It also makes a mockery of some of the work we set which is why the nature of that work is having to change, which I what I explained in my first post.

It's not my impact, it's the impact of AI, and if your subject is creative writing it cannot be overestimated. Traditional creative writing is dying out, AI is LLM and it'll only get better at it, much better than human beings. The schools obviously are not catching up with the times, they never will be able to as all systems are behemoths, but your pupils just live in the near future as young generations always do, and they see the futility of such exercise. They already know they won't be doing "old school" creative writing in their life anyway.

The nature of work has to change indeed but I don't think it would be viable to change it to what you described, just to increase control and assess only the work done with the "controller" present. In real life it's impossible to control every single person every single minute so what's the point in setting up such artificial conditions.

It would be interesting to see how creative writing will evolve. The essence of great literature is addressing human condition, experience, emotions, struggles, hopes, and AI will never be able to replicate this, but very few human beings are able to write great literature and I'm not sure it's a teachable skill.

Everything else is just a "technical" writing, modern children's books my DC is reading non stop are not worth the paper they're printed on, it's just the endless recycling of the same plots, characters, devices, a really boring stuff which AI can do and is already doing easily.

I'd say human beings will have to become more human to survive the shift.

You want children to become more human but for schools to stop bothering to teach creative writing and to start teaching them how to get ChatGPT to write them a story instead?

Perhaps we should stop bothering to teach art and music too. There's apparently literally no value in doing it yourself.

@Readingsloth homework. Which, incidentally, is proven to have little impact on academic outcomes.

Can you elaborate on what you mean, and why?

I get it that there are various schools of thought on how much homework is appropriate. But are there really pedagogy experts who claim that homework is useless? How will pupils practice English writing, solving maths exercise, or spelling and conjugating in a foreign language without homework?

@Ubertomusic I'm only half joking tbh. Children of today will be living in the world of AI, they absolutely have to learn how to use this tool productively, otherwise they will be unemployable

Yes, but getting AI to write homework for you is not a productive use of the tool.

but pupils will absolutely need to learn how to use it for research or solving difficult tasks

Which means appreciating that AI has no concept of truth and can allucinate.
It's fine to use AI as an advanced search engine if it can produce reliable references. But pre-teens are unlikely to have the maturity to understand what references are reliable.

A very good friend teaches at university and tells me that the kind of absolute nonsensical AI-generated bullshit he sees in some of the assignments that even master students submit is absolutely shocking. He teaches a scientific subject, and often sees stuff which might seem broadly plausible, but that an expert in the field immediately spots as bullshit AI halllucination.

But pre-teens are unlikely to have the maturity to understand what references are reliable.

That was exactly my point, we have to learn this ourselves (the vast majority of adults don't understand this either, even from traditional sources, and MN is full of bullshit like the one upthread "homework is proven to have little impact on academic outcomes") and teach our children accordingly.

This book should be compulsory reading at secondary school:

https://callingbullshit.org/

When do you think the teacher should mark the homework? When they come home at 6.30pm perhaps after collecting their own children from after school club?

Often it’s after they have made dinner and bath, book, bed depending on their age.. or listening to their own child read.. which after a full day teaching is hard to muster up the enthusiasm.

Do you think that teachers are robots looking after your children? They are people, some are parents, some have families.. they have degrees, post grads and student loans… and then paid what is an insulting hourly wage as it is for every hour they put in.

So much is done extra because they care. Don’t mistake that kindness for what you think your child should be ‘entitled to’

A lot of posters have politely explained to you about the benefits of/ and futility of homework…

Have you researched any of this yourself??

Or is it that you are annoyed that some poor parent is not ignoring their own children to decipher your child’s ‘thrown together and couldn’t give a shit’ work?

Teachers weren’t robots in the past either. They marked homework. I understand from PP that it’s all the fault of cuts in spending since 2010. A convenient year that gets mentioned by people wanting to make a political point.

Thanks to this thread I now get the point about kids using AI at home being pointless to mark. We are certainly in a transition period with AI and I agree we all need to evolve.

Interestingly about AI.
DD Yr 9 has 3 x 30 min homework per night ie 3 x subjects per day. This gets marked and written + verbal feedback within 2 days. If the pupils are found to have used AI then they get a log/detention. They then have lessons in computer science about how to use AI responsibly and how to fact check + use alternate sources such as primary and secondary source books/journals etc.

How do you expect Yr 10+11 to have learned good study habits if they have never been given homework + therefore the opportunity to practice and hone their organisation and time management skills?

You can't give zero homework Yr 7-9 and then miraculously expect them to know how to study for GCSEs.

AI is not intelligent. It's a large language model. That means it looks at previously written texts and guesses at what a likely next word or phase should look like.
For people or subjects which are written about frequently it will usually hallucinate fairly accurately (a kid who uses it to research Charles Darwin will probably get a sensible answer). For subjects it has less data to draw on, it will just make up something plausible-sounding.
My husband is a university lecturer and AI will just make up plausible-sounding references which are complete nonsense. If kids' homework was something like "write a description of our school" it will hallucinate a made up school.
And even if the essay looks sensible - why would you want your kid to do that? There are multiple reasons to ask a kid to write an essay on Charles Darwin.

• So they can practice spag and writing skills
• So they learn about the theory of evolution (pretty important basic information to have!)
• So they can pass their GCSE Biology

If your kid consistently types "what was the theory of evolution" into ChatGDP then prints it out without reading it (yes, people do this) you get none of that. You get an adult who can't research effectively, who can't string a basic sentence together, who doesn't know what evolution is and who fails their Biology exam. Why on earth would you want that?

There is a lot of research into homework.

the evidence is that at primary level reading and possibly a small amount of maths is effective.

the sort of homework that many primaries set - make a Viking longship, investigate castles etc - is not generally effective in helping children learn.
it’s good for general cultural capital but it doesn’t improve specific learning,

at secondary level the evidence is that homework can be effective in helping students improve, but they needs to
a) actually do it
b) it needs to be quite tightly tied into the curriculum.

most homework in secondary schools is set because there is a homework policy and parents expect it.

i was a teacher for many years. The bright motivated kids did homework. The not bright motivated kids did it and got it wrong. The not bright not motivated didn’t do it.

Your DD is in private iirc? We also have homework that is marked or given feedback on, and it's been like this since y1 even during covid, no exception. The point people make on this thread though is teachers in state are doing everyone a favour just turning up for work for this pay. Fair enough but I think ppl should not delude themselves with the idea their children will learn a lot without homework. In history for example it's impossible to analyse sources and write an essay within lesson time which effectively means no homework = no knowledge or skills acquired. We have lots of friends in top 10 schools and they all have a massive amount of HW starting in y8 at the latest.

I can also see a shift away from digital platforms and devices in private sector. Many parents are up in arms against addictive apps that gamify learning without in-depth understanding and reinforce instant gratification with stars and badges.

I personally have no firm opinion on that as the nature of work and learning is changing too fast, I'm just observing it with interest.

Yes DD is at independent.
She was state for primary and very little homework which then didn't get marked so absolutely no point to it.

They have a school device but most homework is handwritten in their books. Like I said, they also get taught how to study, how/when to use AI appropriately but also how to use physical books + a library etc.

Kids have to be taught how to study/how to write essays/how to manage their time independently to study etc. I just don't see how you can teach these without some elements of homework. There isn't enough time in a state school day to do this surely?