4 Ways to Get Students to Submit Assignments on Time More Often

Secondary schools have shifted dramatically over the last 20 years when it comes to digital assignments. The vast majority of secondary teachers today assign, collect, grade, and return digital homework much more frequently than paper-based assignments. Some teachers manage their classrooms with exclusively digital submissions of work.

While this shift has increased efficiency for students and teachers alike, it hasn’t stopped the issue of students turning assignments in late. For many of us, when we were students, there weren’t digital assignments: The teacher passed out a worksheet; you completed it; you passed it to your neighbor, who then added it to the class pile; and by the time the bell rang, all the papers in the classroom had been “picked up” by the teacher.

In the span of three minutes, 100 percent of the student work in the class for that period had been collected.

Today, many teachers are using Google Classroom or another learning management system to assign and collect work. For a given assignment, perhaps 12 out of 25 students will actually turn in their work on time.

A teacher then has to follow up with each student, taking valuable time to try to get work, often continually extending the deadline to try to help students. Then, by the time they actually get the assignment, the opportunity to give meaningful feedback might be gone, as the student has already moved on to the next thing.

REDUCing the Number of LATE ASSIGNMENTS

Late assignments not only take up teachers’ time and attention but reduce their ability to give meaningful feedback, negatively impacting students’ success in class. But there are strategies teachers can use to help increase the amount of assignments their students turn in on time and ensure that students are getting the timely, meaningful feedback they need to improve.

1. Implement short deadlines. While there are benefits to having students work on assignments over an extended period of time, there are also many assignments that can be completed during one class period. Setting a short deadline, for example the end of the class period, helps teachers ensure that students turn the work in, because teachers can actively monitor students and follow up immediately if there is an issue.

I recommend letting students know that the assignment is due at the end of the class, giving students a five-minute warning when the period is ending, and then using a live “turn in” tracker—projecting on the screen your view of the assignment that shows when something has been turned in. This allows students to watch the process unfold and ensures that every student knows when they have completed and turned the assignment in.

2. Utilize mini-submissions. When assigning a larger, multistep or multiday project, it can be helpful to break up the work for students and require them to turn something in at each step. Not only does this give you as the teacher more data points, but it helps students stay on track for the larger assignment so that they don’t end up facing the entire task the day before it is due.

Depending on what the project is, you can decide what those smaller submissions should be. For a longer written assignment, having students turn in their outline, then a draft of the first paragraph, followed by a full draft, followed by the completed assignment, would break down the large task and give you the opportunity to provide feedback throughout the process, as opposed to only at the end.

3. Collect something from each class period. When engaging students in bigger, more complicated projects, some teachers will dedicate an entire class period as a working block for the project. But often, there isn’t anything for students to submit after that—they aren’t done with the entire project yet, but hopefully they are making meaningful progress on it.

Instead, it can be beneficial to ensure that there is something for students to turn in from each class period. This is not only helpful for these bigger projects—guiding students through the process and actively helping them make meaningful progress—but also helpful during any class period, as it builds the expectation that students should be showing what they’ve learned each day in some way.

This can be a mini-submission for a larger project or an exit ticket in which students demonstrate their understanding of the day’s lesson.

4. Utilize in-person feedback. One thing I’ve heard from students across middle and high schools is that they don’t review the feedback they receive on digital assignments. For many of them, they simply hit Submit and move on. When a student is handed a physical piece of paper with written feedback from a teacher, they might be more likely to review it, but they can, and often do, still ignore it.

Instead, teachers can use in-person, verbal feedback to help students recognize that their work is being seen and ensure that they are actually getting the feedback you give. There are many ways to plan for this kind of feedback, but I’ve found it to be most effective when a teacher checks in individually with a student, while the rest of the class is working on something either in groups or independently, and goes through the turned-in assignment.

A teacher can show the student the assignment on the computer, review the written feedback they’ve outlined, and give the student an opportunity to clarify anything or ask questions of their own. After using this kind of in-person feedback on a few assignments, I’ve seen more students turn their work in on time because they know that it will be checked, that they will get feedback, and that they will have to explain themselves if there isn’t anything to review.

Each of these strategies can help teachers get more work from students in a timely manner, allowing them to gauge student understanding and provide feedback. Plus, when teachers don’t need to spend time chasing down missing work, they have more time to spend providing feedback, planning instruction, and building relationships with their students.