In my classroom for the past couple of years, late work has become an ever growing problem. Students seemed to have no motivation to meet deadlines, be that intrinsic or external motivation. This problem grew even with students knowing that late work would be penalized, simply didn’t care. After talking with a few students about my observations of this phenomenon, I came to realize that most students didn’t see any value in getting homework/classwork in on time. This became especially true if there was no penalty attached to late work. While many teachers don’t want to be punitive in the recording of late work, this then leads students to not have consequences for the turning work in late.

The Methods of the Past

Many teachers combat this problem of late work by assessing a point deduction for work being turned in late, while this is a somewhat effective method many students will simply take the point reduction to do other things. Students often see the cost-benefit as being on their side if they turn the work in late. This creates a judgement situation that students don’t fully win either way and they are forced to choose the least negative scenario.

While some teachers simply don’t except late work, which can be very detrimental to students grade. This method also doesn’t motivate a student to change their behavior, it simply causes them to give up on that assignment and possible others in the future.

Solving the Problem

Once again we have to reminder that students are still kids and are going to make mistakes, especially elementary and middle school students, however by high school they should have enough basic organization skills developed to not miss assignments, though this is not always the case. While teachers should be helping students to build organization skills using traditional methods such as checklists and calendars, building a method into the grading system that does assign a penalty for late work isn’t necessarily a negative as long as students have a way to fix the problem. In my classes when a student turns an assignment in late, they are assessed a 25%. However, they can have this penalty removed if they email their parents and myself and explain what the assignment is, why it was late and how they are going to prevent assignments from being late in the future. The assignment is still flagged as being late, but the point penalty is removed. This methodology does two powerful things, it forces students to own their mistake and admit the problem to their parents and the teacher and secondly, it allows them to fix the problem. While many students do you use this two or three times throughout the card marking and solve the problem, those that are chronically late submitters simply don’t do the work to remove the penalty.

Conclusions

In the end we as teachers are trying to educate students and trying to improve their behaviors. This method for handling late work, while as punitive aspects, it allows students to make a mistake but also gives them an avenue to acknowledge and fix the problem. Additionally, it puts little work on the teacher beyond the simple record keeping tasks related to the gradebook.