Using Take-Home Assignments to Increase School-Wide Accountability
And Student Achievement
Ruwan Jayasinghe
Version 1.2
Your thoughts and comments (especially negative ones) would be gladly accepted and included in the next version.

Dear Colleague,
Attached you will find a proposal that I would like use as the basis for starting a discussion on the viability of take-home assessments. It will let us measure progress made by students as well as allow for massive support for in-class instruction. This paper is the result of about a year’s worth of discussions with teachers, parents, administrators, and people from the printing industry on their questions and thoughts on how something like this could be implemented. 
Here are some questions I would like to pose to you:
•	Would you like all your students to complete and return all your take-home assignments?
•	Would you like the administration to help you manage the paper required, the printing, the collection, and in some cases the grading of such assignments so that you are responsible only for creating the assignments?
•	Would you like the administration’s help in following up on uncooperative students and parents?
•	Would you like the graded assignments available for inspection by your parents?
•	If you want the assistance of an outside grader and would you like the grades automatically included in your grade book?
•	If you so desire, would you like the students to do “test-prep” assignments and have them graded within this same framework?
•	If the students have access at home, would you like them to do these assignments on-line?
If the answers to these questions were mostly yes, I would like you to read the rest of the paper and would be very grateful for your feedback. As I stressed above, this is a work in progress and mostly a starting point for further discussion. As I also stress in the paper, the points made are from the standpoint of a perfect school. In practice many adjustments will have to be made to meet realities on the ground. 

Ruwan Jayasinghe, Teacher
Computer Science Department

Dear Parents of Name of Student,
Attached you will find a proposal that I would like use as the basis for starting a discussion on the viability of take-home assessments. It will let us measure progress made by students as well as allow for massive support for in-class instruction. This paper is the result of about a year’s worth of discussions with teachers, parents, administrators, and people from the printing industry on their questions and thoughts on how something like this could be implemented. 
Here are some questions I would like to pose to you:
•	Would you like to be able to see all the take-home assignments that your child is responsible for, at the beginning of the week or semester?
•	Would you like to see the feedback and the grades, the teacher gives for each assignment as soon as it is done, daily? 
•	Would you like the school administration’s help in following up on missed or incomplete assignments?
•	Would you like to hear the comments via a voice recording if you have access to the Internet?
•	If you have access to the Internet, would you like your child to complete all his/her assignments online?
•	Would you like your child to improve his/her performance on standardized tests by doing test preparation as a part of a regular set of take-home-assignments?

If the answers to these questions were mostly yes, I would like you to read the rest of the paper and would be very grateful for your feedback. As I stressed above, this is a work in progress and mostly a starting point for further discussion. As I also stress in the paper, the points made are from the standpoint of a perfect school. In practice many adjustments will have to be made to meet realities on the ground. 

Ruwan Jayasinghe, Teacher
Computer Science Department

Dear School Administrator,
Attached you will find a proposal that I would like use as the basis for starting a discussion on the viability of take-home assessments. It will let us measure progress made by students as well as allow for massive support for in-class instruction. This paper is the result of about a year’s worth of discussions with teachers, parents, administrators, and people from the printing industry on their questions and thoughts on how something like this could be implemented. 
Here are some questions I would like to pose to you:
•	Would you like to be able to see all the take-home assignments that your students are responsible for, at the beginning of the week or semester?
•	Would you like to see the feedback and the grades, the teacher gives for each assignment as soon as it is done, daily? 
•	Would you like the district administration’s help in following up on students who are chronic non-performers, via the legal system?
•	Would you like to be able to monitor the work done by students for standards compliance on a daily basis?
•	Would you like your students to improve their performance on standardized tests by doing test preparation as a part of a regular set of take-home-assignments?
•	Would you like to see increased parent participation in student performance in general?

If the answers to these questions were mostly yes, I would like you to read the rest of the paper and would be very grateful for your feedback. As I stressed above, this is a work in progress and mostly a starting point for further discussion. As I also stress in the paper, the points made are from the standpoint of a perfect school. In practice many adjustments will have to be made to meet realities on the ground. 

Ruwan Jayasinghe, Teacher
Computer Science Department

Abstract 
	Teaching is a profession as old as written language.  The job of teachers has remained much the same for centuries.  Teachers facilitate learning and provide experiences for students to assimilate what they learn.  Written assignments both in class and for homework are still a significant way to increase and reinforce student learning, participation, and achievement. 
For these assignments to be effective they must be evaluated and returned in a timely fashion.  The timeliness of evaluation is paramount in holding student motivation, and correcting errors in student understanding while it still matters.  This puts a great strain on teachers for time to accomplish this evaluation and assessment process.
	What has changed over time is the amount of students a teacher must foster.  The modern teacher has thirty students in each of five periods a day.  That is an average of 150 students to evaluate.  If a teacher spends just five minutes per student a week to evaluate student assignments this is twelve and a half hours a week the teacher must find outside class for grading.  This makes meaningful assessment of student written assignments an onerous task for teachers.  As a result, either the teacher will decrease the amount of assignments the student is required to complete so he or she will be able to give the necessary attention to the evaluation process, or he or she will not actually grade each paper.    Either way, student learning and achievement may be compromised.
	Evaluation allows students to take learning further—both in motivation to continue doing homework or written assignments in class knowing it will be subject to evaluation, and through evaluation to learn what the student needs help understanding.
	I believe high schools need to adopt a model more like colleges and business do, of outsourcing.  This model would entail student work to be scanned into a computer databank and graded by graders.  These graders could be volunteers, or qualified paid people anywhere in the world.  Since the assignments would be in the computer, student work could be tracked by any number of people working in the student’s interest. It could be teachers, administrators, parents, or the student him or herself.  Students would have timely feedback as would teachers, so both would know areas needing more attention.  The model would be automatically a paperless portfolio for use in assessment and presentation since assignments could be stored indefinitely.  
	Teachers could assign more activities to increase student learning and achievement while increasing meaningful assessment of the activities.  Students at risk could be identified and tutored.  Parents could be notified of the need for their involvement to monitor homework (or attendance).  And any discrepancy regarding grading could be reviewed by using the built-in portfolio feature.
This model would move teaching to the next level, and schools like Roosevelt High School might actually be making news for innovation and achievement, as opposed to current news of becoming a state-run school.

Using Take-Home Assignments to Increase School-Wide Accountability
And Student Achievement
Ruwan Jayasinghe
Version 1.1
Take-Home assignments given to students as a part of a lesson are intended to reinforce knowledge gained during the day.  Most schools and teachers use this strategy only as an addendum to regular in-class activities and give very low priority to its completion and quality.  In most cases getting more than 10% of the grade, for take home assignments is a very rare occurrence.
Our proposal is designed around the idea that take-home work can be used as a device to further the ability to assess student performance and create a system where all parties are easily accountable for student achievement.   This system would essentially create a central online homework evaluation center, which could easily track and retrieve copies of student assignments for portfolio review purposes, for student participation rates, and for timely review and feedback to the students.  This would mean that non-participating students could be flagged for help, or parents could be notified quickly to intervene in their child’s work habits and participation.  It would also mean that teacher-grading time would be greatly reduced. An  additional but unintended feature of this system could be the ability to tightly calibrate each assignment to the relevant standards. It could also be used as a preparation-for-the-next-day assignment, which has the possibility to make each and every lesson near 100% effective.

Background
This system would provide for more efficient grading and relief for teachers.  For example, if an average teacher teaches thirty students per period five periods per day for one hundred eighty days a year, and if the average lesson lasts two periods, then each student could be could be submitting eighty to ninety take-home assignments per year.  This totals approximately three thousand or so sets of paper returned to be assessed by the teacher, and entered into a grading system.  
Let’s imagine a perfect system where all students turn-in all take-home assignments on time and a teacher having time to give proper attention to each person’s work.  If each paper took five minutes to read and assess, over the period of one year the average teacher will spend fifteen thousand minutes or two hundred fifty hours giving a five-minute look-over to each paper. Using this existing system as a medium for assessment would be prohibitive in terms of time and effort by the teacher. 
How Would This System Work?
To make this proposal work, a support system can be established to give participating teachers some assistance in collecting and grading each paper in the best possible manner. Continuing with the idea of the perfect school, of students, and of teachers, let’s say they have all the facilities to provide all the assignments printed on paper, using a laser printer. This paper will include the student’s ID number in the form of a bar code or other machine-readable tag.  At the end of each lesson or at some other appropriate point the teacher would hand out these sheets to students to complete and return the next day. 
As expected, these perfect students would complete the assignment to the best of their ability and sometime the next day drop their paper into a drop-box located in a central place.  
A staff person assigned to this duty would pick up and run them through a high-speed scanner that converts all of them to online viewable documents. Using a database structure these papers can now be identified by the ID of the student and to a particular lesson. To assist in processing such a large number of papers quickly, the teacher would have provided a key or a rubric by which to grade each assignment.  At this point the teacher or some appointed designee, such as a grader, would use the key or the rubric and provide meaningful feedback and a grade for each assignment.
These grades and feedback could now be a part of a system that can be used to quantify the progress of each student and also measure the quality of the work done in class.  Since all assignments are all on-line, any qualified person, anywhere, can be given access to completed assignments and a rubric so that it can be commented and graded.  This raises the question of reliability among graders.  
Since all work done by outside graders have no direct association to the identities of students or teachers, the assignments can be mixed and matched to allow for periodic quality control checks on the graders, themselves.  Comparing grades given to the same paper by different graders can accomplish this very easily.   An inter-rater reliability calculation can be created to grade the graders and their competencies.
Possible Problems  
A possible problem with a system such as this is that, students will at some point try to game the system.  This can be alleviated by visual checks to compare other forms of work to the take-home assignments, done at random. From the beginning the students would be aware that a system is in place to compare work done at school to work done at home. The other most commonly anticipated problem could be misidentified and incorrectly completed work.  In this case, the grader could flag these for the attention of the teacher, who would make the corrections personally.  
Requirements
From the teacher’s point of view, the only work required would be to give meaningful assignments that are directly related to each lesson and then provide a rubric or a key to allow any qualified person to give a grade. The data would be made available to the teacher in real-time, as soon as the grader completes the work of grading and commenting.  
From the student’s point of view, they would collect the assignment from the teacher and then submit the completed paper to the centralized scanner. Provision could be made to return the original to the teacher or the student directly. The result of the assessment of this work would be available to the student in real-time, as soon as the grader completes the work of grading and commenting.  Students’, who don’t receive appropriate grades for their work or don’t submit work on time, can be automatically assigned to an After School Help Center (Appendix A) so that they can be given the assistance needed to complete their work. 
From the grader’s point of view all student work would be seen, be graded and commented on online. The grades would be added to student’s grade book. Any non-compliance to the basic requirements of the assignment would be flagged electronically. It can now be forwarded to the assigning teacher for inspection and action. 
From the system’s point of view, all paper versions of documents will be scanned in and made available to account holders as deemed necessary. Teachers also could make the assignments available for completion online. This would completely take away the need for paper-based handling. In other words this could also function as a means for transitioning a school system from paper transactions to doing all things online. 
At the inception, a method needs to be in place to recruit outside graders, assess their capabilities and train them to use the system in a consistent manner. For example a general call to volunteer among parents and siblings could provide a starting point. As the graders perform and their “ratings” appear consistent and stable they could be invited to apply as a paid grader to retain them as long-term helpers. For instance a college student who intends to be a teacher could spend a few hours a day grading papers for extra money.
Benefits
I believe a system such as this would increase student participation in take-home activities, increase the quality of student work, thereby increase student learning.   It would also allow a way for teachers to have portfolios without having to manage the paper-based products.  Parents could be shown student work over time when grades are in dispute or just for greater knowledge and understanding.  It would also increase the amount and timeliness of papers actually graded, since teachers would be freed up to grade the most important assignments while intermediate-level assignments could be handled by “other” graders.
Other Benefits
Other parts of the school management system that are paperbound can also be integrated into this system. For example a parent that comes in to enroll their child into the school will generate a few forms that are a part of the enrollment process. Instead of handing them a blank form to be filled out and accepted, the clerk would enter a few personal details into the system and all paper forms necessary will be printed out, now with an identifying barcode printed on the paper. After the parent fills out all the details the scanner system will make the document available as an electronic image to staff for further processing. From there on many things can be done to this information. For instance the forms can be machine read or converted manually to electronic data and added to an existing database. This process can also be all electronic from the beginning where the parent fills in all registration data into a computer terminal similar to one that is used at the reception desk at conventions and large gatherings.  
Overall
  This idea revolves around the fact that success of this system could significantly reduce the workload of the personnel in an (ideal) school while tremendously increasing the support for instruction and the ability to assess student work in near real-time. So take for instance that standardized tests need in-class time for preparation. This system could be accommodated to take on a few carefully placed test-prep assignments at crucial times to enhance the test scores of the student. Since this system provides a wealth of data about student progress, why bother with standardized tests anyway? If a school or district is unhappy with the time taken away from instruction to take tests that provide inadequate feedback, this system could be seen as a total replacement for all the tests that are now required of students.
This type of system could put a school like ours in the headlines for innovation and high performance instead of the normal poor-performance reported.

Appendix A:  A Design Idea for an After School Help Center

The Math Lab Run by the Math Department of Cerritos Community College stands out as a good model to follow in setting up a place where students can find assistance to complete their assignments. This lab is basically a classroom with a long table at the head where 5 to 6 assistants sit and await help requests from students.  They will either come in on their own or be referrals from a teacher. The Help center will have a complete set of textbooks and a few computers available to its users. An appropriately qualified teacher will be in charge and seniors from our school or college students from nearby colleges could be recruited and trained for this purpose.  On a given day the student will walk in with the paper/s given to him or her by the teacher of their subjects and start working on their own. If the student has not received the assignment in question they can sit at the computer, login and then either print out or complete the assignment online.  When the student has completed the work he/she can drop off the papers into the main drop box for processing.
Staff for this facility could be a Teacher who is willing to work after hours or an outside provider of tutorial services. The student tutors could initially be recruited as volunteers or offered credit as tutors. They could be also rewarded on the basis of the number of assignments completed by participating students. As the use of the facility gains a request could be made for funding to pay stipends to the tutors. Additionally these same people can be assigned grading tasks from assignments already submitted via the scanner. So on a quiet day instead of waiting to help students the tutors can be entrusted with grading, to make maximum use of their productive time.
Security Issues  
In a setting where many non-motivated students are attending the Help Center, security may become an issue. As a means to discouraging problems from such students, the presence of a probation officer or school police might be warranted. This presence of officers could also be used for regular counseling of students

Appendix B:  Implementation Details
The implementation of this system can be done in ways that fit the resources available to the school as well as the willingness of teachers to participate in it. We have included some suggested levels of implementation that could be the basis for designing one’s own system.
Level A
Assumptions: No financial, procedural, or volitional restraints are present.
•	To provide an disincentive for non-participation by students, the school will provide a binding resolution that no teacher will provide a grade higher than a D to any student who has not submitted all required assignments or been released from such obligation by a local arbitration panel. As an incentive to participate, students in good standing could be, for example exempt from, in-class quizzes and some exams.
•	The school or district will provide a binding resolution that all teachers will provide a Take-Home-Assignment printed on paper, related to the days work, by the end of the period.
•	The school or district will provide a binding resolution that all teachers will grade and comment each Take-Home-Assignment now available online, by the end of the week.
•	The school will provide a central collection point manned by clerical staff to collect returns by students. I.e. a drop box. 
•	The school will provide a Scanning and ID recognition system to scan all papers into a web-based application.
•	The school will provide a web-based interface to complete their assignments online to students who have Internet connections at home.
•	The school will train the teachers to input assignments and keys (or rubrics) into the system
•	The school will provide a group of auxiliary graders to assist the teachers if requested.
•	The school will assign follow-up tasks such as calling parents of no-shows, to all school personnel.
•	The school will assign administrators to follow-up on inconsistencies on the part of teachers and other personnel.
Level B
Assumptions: No procedural or volitional restraints are present. But finances are a problem. 

The major cost of this system will be for ongoing salaries and benefits paid to dedicated employees. If these costs can be negated by transferring and redistributing duties to existing personnel, a general lowering of the total cost could be realized. The district can pay for the cost of the software if it is integrated as a module into an existing student information system. This would be a natural fit as all student information would be current in SIS.  
•	To provide an disincentive for non-participation by students, the school will provide a binding resolution that no teacher will provide a grade higher than a D to any student who has not submitted all required assignments or been released from such obligation by a local arbitration panel. As an incentive to participate, students in good standing could be, for example exempt from, in-class quizzes and some exams.
•	The school or district will provide a binding resolution that all teachers will provide a Take-Home-Assignment printed on paper, related to the days work, by the end of the period.
•	The school or district will provide a binding resolution that all teachers will grade and comment each Take-Home-Assignment now available online, by the end of the week.
•	The school will provide a central collection point manned by existing clerical staff to collect returns by students. I.e. a drop box. 
•	The district or a grant will provide for a Scanning and ID recognition system to scan all papers into a web-based application.
•	The district or a grant will provide a web-based interface to complete their assignments online to students who have Internet connections at home.
•	The school will train the teachers during staff development time to input assignments and keys (or rubrics) into the system
•	The school will provide a group of auxiliary graders to assist the teachers if requested. These people for example, could be volunteers among the neighbor population and college students working for credit at their institutions. 
•	The school will assign follow-up tasks such as calling parents of no-shows, to all school personnel.
•	The school will assign administrators to follow-up on inconsistencies on the part of teachers and other personnel.

Level C
Assumptions: No procedural or financial restraints are present. But cooperation by faculty and staff is a problem.
•	As an incentive to participate, students in good standing could be, for example exempt from, standing in line at the cafeteria, given raffle tickets at random.
•	The school or district will provide all students with a Take-Home-Assignment provided by a third party. This will be general in nature, printed paper, related to the standards affected in the days work, by the end of the period. The teacher will only be required to distribute the papers to the students.
•	The school or district will provide a third party to grade and comment each returned Take-Home-Assignment now available online, by the end of the week.
•	The school will provide a central collection point manned by clerical staff to collect returns by students. I.e. a drop box. 
•	The school will provide a Scanning and ID recognition system to scan all papers into a web-based application.
•	The school will provide a web-based interface to complete their assignments online to students who have Internet connections at home.
•	The school will engage the services of a third party to follow-up tasks such as calling parents of no-shows, misidentified papers and managing a cadre of outside graders.
•	The school will assign administrators to follow-up on inconsistencies on the part of the third party service provider.

Appendix C:  Cost Estimate for Implementation at Roosevelt High School 
(Note: These numbers are wild guesses and presented here only as a rough guide to the cost of implementation.)

Equipment Costs – One Time
•	High Speed Scanner 						$	5000.00
•	High Speed Printers (per participating classroom)		$	  500.00
Personnel Costs – One Time
•	Initial training time (per participating teacher)		$	  500.00
Equipment Costs – On Going
•	Printer cartridges/yr (per participating classroom)		$	  200.00
•	Reams of Paper/yr    (per participating classroom)		$ 	  200.00
•	Printer maintenance contracts					$ 	  100.00
•	Scanner maintenance contracts				$	1000.00
Personnel Costs – On Going
•	Scanner Operator and Paper Handler/ yr inc. benefits	$        50,000.00
•	Computer room Clerical staff/yr inc. benefits		$        50,000.00
•	Partial salary of Admin Person/yr inc. benefits		$        40,000.00
As specified above, the total cost for initial setup and ongoing costs for one year of operation taking all our classrooms into consideration would be,

Equipment Costs – One Time (160 classrooms)			$	85,000.00
Personnel Costs – One Time (270 Teachers)			$        135,000.00
Equipment Costs – On Going/Yr					$	81,000.00
Personnel Costs – On Going/Yr					$        140,000.00
Expected Yearly Costs( for 3 years)
Total Cost for First Year					$        446,000.00
Total Cost for Second Year					$        221,000.00
Total Cost for Third Year					$        221,000.00