Late Work: What We Know
I’m not going to screenshot and post some of the Tweets I saw this morning, but I saw multiple takes this morning that said something like this:
We need to stop accepting late work, use 0s to deter missing assignments, and stop accepting retakes if we want kids to take us seriously.
Now, while most of these takes this morning came from people who aren’t even directly connected to a school anymore (and as such, I always am hesitant to accept their ideas, especially if they haven’t experienced what teaching has been like since the school shutdowns), I also know there is a growing sentiment in teachers to lean this direction. I don’t blame anyone for that. We are grappling with a growing problem of missing work, disengagement from school, etc., and it makes sense to think the answer is to tighten things down, leverage painful consequences to motivate the behaviors we want to see.
My goal in this post isn’t to bash that. Teachers are doing what they can right now with the context that we’re in, and it’s a difficult one. My goal here is to explain why that approach might not have the intended consequences we hope for, despite how it might appear on the surface, and then provide alternative options.
Understanding Motivation
The tricky thing with late penalties is their appearance of being effective. I won’t argue that a more painful consequence might increase the amount of assignments turned in for the short-term. This is what makes it tricky. It has the appearance of working, and often times our own confirmation bias will convince us that this is having the intended effect.
But, I want to question a few things. First, I want to look at the long-term impact of this. In multiple studies (I would recommend this one and this one), they have found that academic success is a two-way street with motivation. Not only does a higher level of intrinsic motivation result in further academic success, but academic success also results in higher levels of motivation. As such, our goal is not to arbitrarily inflate metrics of success, but rather to ensure we are not creating unnecessary barriers to possible success.
When we slap a grade penalty on an assignment, and especially when don'e so in a grading system that averages scores over time on a 100-point scale, we are likely going to harm a student’s long-term motivation because the averaging system means that a couple of mistakes takes the possibility of “success” (many things I want to argue about regarding that term and how it’s applied in school, but now’s not the time) off the table. While this may push students to simply turn in more work in the short term to avoid these penalties, students who might end up with a few late assignment penalties are more likely to experience a decrease in long-term motivation to engage in the learning, which can have impacts well beyond the term we have them in class.
Second, even for students who aren’t impacted by the late or missing work penalties, it may be creating an environment that makes it harder for students to engage in learning. To explain, let me share an image that summarizes the Yerkes-Dodson Law.
Source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-the-yerkes-dodson-law.html
In essence, the study (summary) found that an increase in arousal, defined essentially as rewards and punishments, had a tipping point that ended up decreasing performance. This shouldn’t surprise us. We all have students, or personal experience, with test anxiety, and when that level gets too high, they don’t perform well.
What I’m interested in for this post isn’t that element, but a second element. The tipping point where performance drops changes based on the complexity of the task. Simple tasks are able to withstand greater levels of arousal before performance dips, but complex tasks are impacted by arousal much earlier.
For an example of a simple task, we could say that would be completing an assignment or turning in the assignment. For a complex task, we could say that would be something like learning a concept. Here’s where I want to bring back the grade penalties.
As we increase the punishments for late and missing work, we likely will not impact the student’s ability to complete a simple task (like turning in an assignment), but it becomes more likely that we hinder their ability to perform well on complex processes (like the actually learning the assignment was supposed to promote).
This means that even for students who never see a late penalty in the grade book, the threat of a low grade might not actually promote more learning, but it may actually hinder it. It may promote completion but hinder learning, and the tricky part is that one of those is immediately visible and might be seen as a positive while the other consequence may remain undiscovered until much later, if at all.
Lastly, we need to understand one final thing about motivation, and it’s this: our brains are lazy. Like, really lazy. They are intended to be that way. If I have a goal, my brain will look for the shortest (more accurately, the easiest and simplest) route to the goal. Our brains are not made to look for ways to expend unnecessary energy.
Here’s how this connects to late penalties, and eventually, generative AI.
For many students, the goal is a good grade. So many forces around students (family, school culture, society in general) stresses the narrative that the only way you can have a good life is to get good grades, graduate, get into a good college, etc. To be clear, I hate this narrative, but it is the dominant narrative in society.
Add on top of that grade penalties for late work, and you have many students with an increased level of unhealthy stress who may not believe they can perform well. Those individuals are now looking for the shortest and simplest route to the goal. In this day and age, that answer can be ChatGPT.
In summary, if we are using grade penalties to coerce behavior, we run the risk of (a) minimizing a student’s ability to see themselves as successful, which could harm their motivation to engage in the future and eventually make the problem worse; (b) decreasing the performance of all learners due to an unhealthy increase in stress levels, which can harm our ability to engage in complex tasks like learning; and as a result of both of these (c) increase the likelihood that students will resort to generative AI to simply complete the assignments quickly to avoid these penalties and pursue their misaligned goal of getting a good grade at the expense of learning.
Phew. That was a mouthful. With all of this, what options do we have?
Looking for Alternatives
Here’s the reality: we use grade penalties and academic consequences because they make our lives easier, not because they’re what’s best for students. However, what’s best for students also is not creating habits in them where they don’t learning to manage their time to meet task deadlines, they don’t learn how to motivate themselves to engage in something they may not intrinsically want to do in the moment, and they don’t complete assignments that are sequenced in a way to intentionally build and support their learning. All of these are important for students to learn to do, and they just aren’t going to happen on their own. So, let’s look at a few ways to address these issues while trying to balance out the teacher’s workload.
Big Shift: Changing Assessment Practices
The problem with using late penalties or zeros for missing assignments isn’t inherent in the penalty. The problem is built into how we calculate total grades.
If, for example, we use a traditional task-based grade book where assignments are listening in columns (possibly weighted) and then those columns are averaged over the course of a term, then yes, late penalties and zeros will have a significant outcome on the final grade, which is where we see some of the motivational concerns about this approach.
However, if we instead are using more of a standards-based approach where students have multiple attempts to demonstrate learning, and we then use that as evidence to determine a final score by prioritizing consistent and recent evidence to support where they are at in relation to the standard, then things can change.
This is where I’ll will make an admission: My policy the past two years was to not accept late work past the deadline, unless the student demonstrated a pattern of behavior that resulted in multiple assignments missed. (More on that in the next section). For many students, they might miss one assignment, but my goal is not to collect every single assignment from them. My goal is to have enough evidence of learning to be able to reliably determine a score for the standard. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not expecting perfection. I’m expecting a pattern and trend of productive behavior.
Yes, kids could still miss an assignment and be successful at the end of a term in that standard.
And this is where the people looking for a fight will throw up their hands and scream about those damn woke schools and their snowflake mentality towards accountability and how kids can get away with everything these days.
Settle your confirmation bias down for a second, shut your pie hole, and keep reading.
Alternative Measures of Accountability for Productive Behaviors: Classroom Level
Here’s the deal. Academic penalties have absolutely no research behind them to support the claim that they improve long-term behavior or learning outcomes. Like, absolutely zero.
So when you say I’m not holding students accountable, you actually aren’t holding them accountable to really anything either with grade penalties, which only serve to rank and sort students based on executive functioning skills. Really, you’re penalizing the rate of development of their prefrontal cortex and their amygdala responses. Like, at this point, you might as well just assign grades based on height and wingspan. It’s about as meaningful.
Now, my problem with academic penalties is that they don’t actually serve the purpose they are intended to serve (changing behavioral outcomes in the future) because, as discussed previously, it’s possible they may just exacerbate the problem and stifle learning and creativity.
However, I do think there needs to be consequences to hold students accountable for productive behaviors so that they don’t develop habits that will work against them in the future.
My goal with my consequences is that they do two things: (1) disrupt the conditioned patterns of behavior that are causing the problem, and (2) support the development of motivation and self-efficacy moving forward.
As such, want to know the only late consequence I ever found effective?
Here it is:
If a student demonstrated a pattern of behavior by missing multiple assignments, they would be put on a late work contract. When put on this contract, the student’s grade would change to an I (Incomplete), which would make them ineligible for most school activities. However, once completing the contract, the student’s grade would return to where it was with no long-term penalty.
In order to complete the contract, the student needed to do three things:
Check in their phone with me for ten days of class time.
While this actually changed in my final year because everyone would check in their phone every day, the function of this was to disrupt the pattern of behavior causing them to not complete the assignments. (Students identified phones as their biggest distraction.)
Meet with me twice outside of class time (but during my contracted time).
The purpose of this was to address confusion or misunderstandings that would make them feel like they couldn’t be successful at the task. This was reteaching time, focused on helping them identify evidence of success to believe they can be successful. We would also work on upcoming assignments to ensure they were staying ahead of the game and getting a good start.
Complete all of their missing assignments at a proficient level.
I got so tired of late work being rushed and turned in, and there was no learning involved. Students would spend time working with me and getting feedback during our meeting times to ensure they were submitting sufficient quality.
To be clear, I’m not saying that this is what everyone’s late policy should be. It worked for me and my 130-ish 9th grade students.
Alternative Measures of Accountability for Productive Behaviors: School Level
While we have some influence over this issue at the classroom level, realistically much of the culture around what is acceptable begins at the school level. There are already plenty of schools that have systems in place where if a student has low grades, they get sent to a time built into the school day for them to “complete their work.” However, my concern with this is that it’s focused on grades. It sets the focus in the wrong spot, and if there’s a student in class who’s truly trying their best but has a grade below the threshold, what message are we sending them?
The alternative solution is to shift this to focusing on students with a specific number of missing assignments. Most online grading systems have a way of flagging assignments as missing that teachers could mark (even before they have time to grade them), and then admin can typically pull a report that identifies how many assignments each student is missing.
The reason I like this shift is that it focuses students more on the habits (task management, knowing what assignments are coming, being organized) than it does on the outcome (getting a good grade).
Final Thoughts
When I talk about my concerns with academic penalties for late and missing work, my main concern is about the cognitive and motivational impact of that decision in the long-term, but just as importantly, my other concern is that this approach to holding students accountable isn’t as targeted as it could be.
When I think about consequences for unproductive behaviors, my goal is to identify the source of the problem and then match that with a consequence that is both uncomfortable for students to deter the behavior in the future (students dislike having to give up their “free” time even more than they dislike losing a few points on an assignment), but I also want to ensure that the consequence is targeted towards the behavior or habits it is trying to correct and change.
This is really why I think we need to question the grade penalties. They paint with too broad of a brush without really doing anything to support a change in behavior in the long-term.
Want to dig into motivation a bit more?
My new book, Hacking Student Motivation is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
