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The Impact of Online Homework Help on Students’ Learning in the Context of the Russian School of Mathematics
Online homework help providers are rapidly expanding because of their usefulness for students. First, online homework help has the potential to address different student learning needs. Indeed, online homework help might be useful for both struggling students – by providing needed remedial help and providing more advanced problems – and high-achieving students – by offering them additional challenging problems. Whereas schools have traditionally provided services to struggling students, there was no way for high-achieving students to advance at their own pace. Online homework help exists to fill that gap and provide high-achieving students the challenges they need. Second, homework help can be used at any time of day, thus eliminating temporal constraints. Finally, it can be useful to students who might not have been able to afford traditional tutoring services, making help free.
What then should we expect to happen when we add online learning resources to the curriculum? Ideally, the addition of online resources might help structurally strengthen some of the contours of the learning frontier (by entities providing online resources) and diminish the incentives to cheat at the upper tail of the ability distribution. This should be beneficial for students throughout the ability distribution, which is what we observe in tertiary education settings. The fact that the content of the online learning resources can be made easily available to all students suggests that this benefit should trickle down, and it is particularly important at the difficult, next the student’s ability to master by self-study stage of learning, which is relevant in the school study period.
In this paper, we empirically evaluate the impact of supplementary online homework help resources of a private school in Russia on students’ grades in mathematics. Our context is interesting given that the Russian school system is well known for a high presence of private tutoring, which is partly due to some of the rigidity of the Russian school curriculum. The study finds that a more intense use of their homework help resources by students decreases students’ grades at the exam. We show that the negative impact is more pronounced for more able students, and that homework help is most intensively used in mathematics topics and at the end of a grade. Overall, the study shows that online homework help resources can be cognitive substitutes for a certain subset of students at the top level, but not complements or cognitive accelerators like we find in earlier literature.
The rapid technological advancement in the modern world offers many new opportunities to effectively transfer knowledge to students interested in learning. Some of the most effective Russian schools of mathematics, such as the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM) with schools in several states of the US, capitalize on the main features of modern technology, most notably on the ability to regularly provide students with challenging homework problems and solutions, and a mechanism for students to ask questions and receive written feedback from the instructor. Despite the many advantages that online-based homework help offers, its implementation does pose many new challenges compared to traditional classroom learning. In this article, we discuss in more detail the differences between the two modes of learning and provide advice on effective deployment of online methods to help young students learn.
Many differences between online versus traditional classroom learning are of technical and pedagogical nature, given that such major factors as the inability to enforce deadlines for completing assignments and lack of immediate spoken feedback diminish the motivational impact of a teacher’s authority outside of the classroom. Since basic human psychology does not change over time, it is easy to understand why teaching a topic like basic algebra almost exclusively online would probably be less effective than classroom learning, especially for students who are struggling with it. We, therefore, do not expect all classroom teaching to ever be completely replaced by online learning tools. Given the high cost of traditional classroom learning, however, there is a great interest in coming up with suitable hybrid models that can preserve many advantages of traditional classroom learning while also offering the benefits of online learning.
The review of studies on online math teaching with Russian School of Mathematics students’ data depicted the utmost importance of “live” math teaching that is delivered when RSM students study at the physical location of an RSM school. When RSM students do their homework, they have questions: problems are hard, students are shy, students don’t work collaboratively. When RSM students do their homework at an RSM school location, teachers help students as they work on their homework. When RSM students do their homework at another location away from an RSM school, students have questions that require teachers’ help to be answered. The second instance generates weak homework completion feedback, resulting in an increased difficulty of quality control over RSM students’ after-classwork process that would lead to RSM measures and targets presence and transparency.
Since students’ ability to work on the mathematical problems is the essential competence, and teachers’ ability to provide help increases competence acquisition, the development of the effective online homework help channel appeared to be of great importance for students completing their homework at a location that is off the RSM school and students working through the hybrid form of education, where offline studies are completed with online-level homework. TripToSpace, an in-the-channel homework help service, was designed through action research and tested under the task of making sure students are well-off technically in the conditions where offline teaching shifts into online-level ones. The service comprises five phases of work: messages are transmitted through the Telegram bot; messages are classified so that those that contain math problem requests would stand out; the grade for a solved or reviewed request is chosen; the response for a hard request would be selected based on the discussions that appeared to be useful; authors discuss how the request had been classified so that the feedback circle would get closed. In the confined communication channel, students can receive help with their math homework rights a post; TripToSpace service runs smoothly.
There are three main avenues for further research on this topic. The first direction of future research is to extend the online tutoring to a larger number of students. In this study, we targeted only those students who needed tutoring the most. Furthermore, this tutoring was provided by tutors who were well-informed about students’ weaknesses. It will be interesting to observe the impact if this tutoring is offered to the general student population. It is also of great interest to see if instruction can be better adjusted to the needs of each student with the help of sharing the test results daily, weekly, or monthly with all participating students in a class.
The second direction of future research is to explore the contribution to learning which is not covered by transfer test scores. High-stakes exams do matter for long-term outcomes. However, the material is also important. The growth of error rates in areas covered by detailed analyses of the tests allows us to compare not only broadband effectiveness in online versus in-class settings but also to shed light on more specific questions. Are there topics for which online instruction is more effective than in-class instruction? Are there areas that are better learned in-class and are there reasons? Are there properties of the group setting behind those differences? What degree of individualization is achieved through a shared list of test results? Are there students who benefit from exposure to in-class explanations? Finally, while our findings on the menu of topics covered by the tutoring offer do not generate clear implications for possible underestimation of the effectiveness of the tutoring online, they do encourage additional analysis on the content dimension.
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