Alex Navarro 1

November 20, 2014

SED 464 Ayala
Marzano
The nine Marzano strategies were created to help students improve
their learning and education through multiple content areas and
through multiple grade levels. Marzano Strategy four is on homework
and practice, which are keys to knowing whether the student is
understanding and comprehending the content information and
whether or not the student is ready to move on.
In this strategy, it states that homework should be matched with the
students skill set. This simply means that as a teacher you should assign
homework that is appropriate to your students skill, grade and level of
understanding. For example, if you are a 7th grade history teacher, dont
assign the students to write a 5-page paper on the civil war due the next
day, when you have just introduced to the students that day. Its
unreasonable and unfair to expect your students to be able to
accomplish that hard of a task, especially since the students didnt
receive enough practice on the content.
This example homework maybe able to be done if you properly prep,
practice and teach the skills the students would need to accomplish the
homework, but only giving the students that one day learning the
content without any real practice is unjustifiable. To master a task,
multiple day practice is needed. Research shows that to become
mastery in a content subject, it takes more than 24 practice sessions to
just reach 80 percent mastery. So to expect students to write a proper
and efficient 10-page paper after one day of talking about the material is
ridiculous. The proper homework that should have been assigned that
day would to have the students do some sort of activity with the vocab.
This gets them familiar with the vocabulary and content that they will
be using during the rest of the unit. It prepared the students for future
lessons and especially for the next day.
Another important part of assigning homework is the feedback.
Feedback is necessary for not only for teachers to tell the students how
they did but also that students future achievement is determined by the
feedback they get. If students get negative feedback, the students may
feel discouraged for the rest of the class and other assignments and not
want to try anymore when they expect more negative feedback is all

that they will ever get. A technique to give proper feedback is called a
complement sandwich. A complement sandwich is where you say
something good, something they need to fix or can improve on and then
end it on a complement again. For example, Your paper was properly
written, but you should justify the your argument more. But overall it is
a good paper.
Using these strategies and techniques like the ones mentioned here,
will greatly affect students achievement any classroom, no matter the
content area or the grade level.