During the summertime, chances are you're teaching a course that meets every day rather than once or twice a week. In a sense, this is a great way to teach, because students are really immersed in the material. On the other hand, if you have any kind of a human turnaround time on grading homework assignments, you may not know until Thursday that your students got confused in Monday's class. And by then, you might be off on a completely different topic.

So how can you track each student's comprehension of the material? Getting accurate and timely reports and information after each homework assignment is essential. Automatically graded chapter assignments can be invaluable in this situation because they give you immediate feedback on your students' understanding. You can find out how well your students understood Monday's class before you even start Tuesday's lecture—so you can address any confusion while their minds are still focused on the issues at hand. And if students receive timely feedback on their assignments, the concepts are reinforced in their minds as well. Utilizing technology to tackle repetitive tasks such as grading and explaining concepts can help your students keep up with the material in an accelerated summer course.

One creative way to increase student understanding is to break up long assignments into "bite-sized chunks." For example, suppose you would normally assign two chapter assignments each week, for a total of around 60 questions. Since most students procrastinate and often complete the assignments right before the due date, they have to go back several class periods—and perhaps several topics—to complete their assignment.

To avoid this, you could assign them 10 or 12 problems per night on the specific topics you covered that day. This might sound like a daunting task, but by leveraging technology you can easily create and grade these multiple assignments to improve students' information retention. Students will be continually reinforcing the concepts you go over in class.

Teaching and learning over the summer can be an invigorating experience. Due to the accelerated pace of the course, utilizing homework chapter specific assignments effectively to target weak areas and reinforce concepts can truly be a success for both you and the students.