apps for homework answers

apps for homework answers

The Impact of Apps for Homework Answers on Education

1. Introduction

With the growing use of technology such as tablets and smartphones in today’s society, the possibilities are limitless. The way we talk, think, and process information is changing. Our attention spans are getting shorter, we are not as curious, and we have a difficult time solving problems on our own. A common complaint with high school students is the fact that they do not have enough time to interact with their teachers. It is no surprise with today’s busy schedules that students pick the quickest solution to a problem. Do students spend too much time multitasking and not enough time learning and understanding? Would downloading an app on your phone for homework answers be efficient? The purpose of this paper is to find out if downloading an app on your phone to receive homework answers is an efficient way for students to learn and understand answers from a simple solution of copying. This includes whether or not it is a missed opportunity to engage with teachers and ask questions for the sake of understanding. This paper will also discuss the opportunity cost of time used while seeking a quick solution and using the time to find the correct answer and learn it. The use of apps for homework answers has grown on students immensely. It is the quickest way to obtain an answer that students are not taking the time to understand. A simple free app download of “Snap Homework” allows students to take a photo of their homework and someone will answer the photo for them. For example, a student from Franklin High School used the app on his math homework. His homework assignment was to take a picture of five graphs and write an equation needed for each transformation. The student took the photos and received the correct answer from someone else. The person replying to the photo of the graph template will give the answer to the equation and also provide a step-by-step guide. This allowed for his easiest way to get math homework done; however, he did not understand the part for the transformation needed to create the graph. This is a simple yet clean example of receiving a quick and efficient answer that someone else interpreted for you.

2. Benefits of Using Apps for Homework Answers

By evaluating articles from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Honolulu Advertiser, we can see the resulting benefits of using educational apps for homework answers. The most apparent advantage is that students who wish to further their knowledge now have the ability to get practice questions right and receive immediate feedback if it was right or wrong. In the past, if a student wanted to practice questions outside of class, they would have to go to the back of the book and look for practice questions, come up with an answer, and then check the back of the book to see if they were correct. With multiple-choice questions, the student would have a 33% chance of getting the right answer, and with no immediate feedback, the student could make the same mistakes over and over. By using apps with questions, students now are able to use their phones, which are their primary means of accessing information, and get questions in an interactive multiple-choice format, which will help them to get immediate feedback of whether they were right or wrong. If the student got the question wrong, The Washington Post article references that there may be app features to help the student understand why the answer was wrong and what the better choice would be next time. Checkmark Learning, an app development company headed by an SAT tutor, says “We noticed that most students taking SAT practice tests were not benefiting from their mistakes because they were not going back to review the test and it’s not very effective to try to answer a question again when you don’t even remember what the old answer was. So we set out to make an app that would quickly create a new test given the same topics but different questions. By having the ability to quickly take many different tests, students would get more practice and would be more confident on the real test.” With the practice of answering different question sets, students can be assured that they are proficient in the topic so that they won’t encounter a question next time during real homework or a test and say “I remember doing this, but I don’t remember how to solve it”.

3. Concerns and Limitations of Apps for Homework Answers

Due to the simple nature of the technology, it is unlikely that apps providing homework answers will see significant improvement in the quality of their answers or increase in price. This means that teachers and students will have to adapt to the existence of these apps as a permanent fixture in education. Even the best students often have incorrect answers to begin with; copying from apps will reinforce these errors, requiring more assessment and feedback than would have been necessary without the apps. An encouraging result from one school in Kentucky is that teacher awareness of the apps exists, and teachers are putting more emphasis on problem-solving in class before assigning homework. This enables on-the-spot guidance and feedback to students while they are in the process of learning, greatly reducing temptation to check answers.

Apps provide a natural temptation for students to cheat. In situations where homework marks are factored into final grades, students using apps to check answers will have an unfair advantage over those who do not. Many schools have academic honesty policies which would include use of an app to get answers to be plagiarism. A somewhat extreme case occurred in New York earlier this year where 70 high school students were found to have paid test-takers or used electronic devices to receive answers to state exams. This was uncovered after an unusual number of erasures in wrong to right answers were uncovered in the data analysis phase, translating into wrong to right erasures 5% higher than the state average.

Concerns and limitations concerning using apps for homework answers are varied. Almost all the apps there are require a subscription or payment in order to access answers to any questions. This raises questions of equity, where students with greater financial resources may have an advantage over their peers. More important are concerns over the quality of the answers themselves, especially given that in most cases students will not receive feedback until after a particular assignment has been submitted. The instructional approach today, especially in math and sciences, emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and discourages direct reliance on books or memorization. Student reliance on apps to get answers may lead to a reduction in time spent on deep learning, and acquisition of skills relevant for future classroom assessment. One math teacher saw an increase in incorrect use of formulae and failure to follow the process described in the lesson after allowing students to use an algebra calculator to check homework.

4. Strategies for Effective Integration of Apps in Education

a. Develop a plan – Before integrating the apps in education, it is very essential to develop a solid plan. This is to ensure that educators, administrators and parents are all well prepared to support the use of the new technology. It is to ensure that you are investing the amount of time needed to understand how specific application is going to help bridge the gap between learning and student understanding. A general idea of “trying an app” is too vague for a plan. You should be able to create a pros and cons list about the use of the technology, this way when it is finally integrated into education, you can reflect on that list to see how effectively the application is serving the student. If the cons outweigh the pros, it is time to find a new app.

Integrating technology and its apps in education is a very essential thing to look upon. When technology keeps evolving, it is very difficult for the best educators to keep up with what is new and to know how it can serve to educate their students. Education is a field which is constantly evolving. Work of educators never ends. You always keep on learning, researching and finding better ways to teach your students. After researching on this topic, we have come up with few strategies to effectively integrate these apps in the field of education which is as below:

5. Conclusion

The implications and risks of homework answer apps on education strive to uncover a divisive and multifaceted issue impacting a contemporary generation of students. It has been found that with excessive use of such apps, the quality of learning is compromised, and there is an emphasis on attaining the right answer, as opposed to understanding the content. There is a distinct correlation between homework answer app use and reduced effort relating to homework completion. As effort is an indicator of future success, papers say this is very damaging to the future of the world economy. Reduced effort will lead to a decline in great minds and innovators our society so desperately needs today. High accolade math and science homework can be done more easily than languages and essay subjects. In accordance with this, data has shown that use of homework answer apps is significantly higher in the aforementioned math and science subjects. With countries seeking to advance their students in math and science subjects in order to secure a strong future on the world economic stage, employers are increasingly looking at grades in these subjects for future employees. Perception of these employer attitudes has led students to try and obtain higher grades in math and science. The evidence that homework answer app use results in lower grades in these math and science subjects is a strong indication that the current mirage of oversupply of homework answer apps is not conducive to a positive educational outcome for students.