does homework helps student learn

does homework helps student learn

The Impact of Homework on Student Learning

1. Introduction to the Debate

Parents and teachers have been debating the correct amount of homework for students for many years. The practice has been documented in the writings of numerous cultures. Homework is often associated with young students’ development and is generally considered to be an important aspect of students’ educational experience. Nonetheless, for some, the burdens associated with student homework have been contradictory to some of the key premises that educators have attempted to promote in public schools. Several commonly held premises underlying the general orientation of the public school systems are that students need time for free play and constructive after-school activities, and that they cannot and should not hurry the development process.

Would students benefit if that time were spent studying or doing homework? Critics question the value of homework and whether homework reinforces the necessity of classroom learning. The expanded use of homework as a tool to help students improve their academic performance might indicate that school work has to take place after school. If this is the case, then applying such a principle to school activities might be viewed as taking the responsibility of the child’s own education from the child and placing it on the school. Homework may, in the end, promote passivity and content quality. Parents and teachers may worry too much about the student, expressing concern about whether one is helping students succeed in establishing their independence too early.

2. Benefits of Homework

There are no shortcuts to achieving excellence in education. Homework is, by itself, a very important activity which encourages time management and practice skills. It is not the quantity of homework and the speed with which it is completed that increases learning, but the quality of students’ work and the feedback from teachers. Homework should not consist of mere repetitious drill work unless sustained drill is necessary to further the child’s understanding of specific concepts. Multiple small doses of homework appear to be more effective than a single large dose.

Homework can enhance independent learning. It is not only an extension of class work requiring direct supervision by a parent or adult, but it is also a tool to promote independent study and to ensure that young people are required, trained, and encouraged to develop good study and organization patterns that will be useful for the rest of their lives. Besides that, homework is a form of student self-evaluation. When homework is checked thoroughly, students can evaluate their comprehension of the material. Homework is also a channel of communication between the school and the family, a visible parent-teacher-student connection.

3. Drawbacks of Homework

One of the more common discussions in our household revolves around the viability of a homework ban. Each side sees benefits and drawbacks with homework, and the time spent on homework in schools is not necessarily reflective of a child’s engagement or ‘grit,’ the desire to seek challenges and overcome them in the belief that they are simply a tool used to get where we need to go. The average student spends three to four hours studying outside the class in addition to class time – approximately four times what the average student spent in 1961. There is a growing sentiment that spending that much time on homework at the expense of other growth is not providing the benefits it once did in increasing student achievement and the number of students who complete college.

We have largely moved away from the view that homework will provide academically beneficial experiences while the student completes their work at home. For much of the work assigned to students, it is unlikely teachers are providing feedback long before the focus of the assignment is forgotten. In fact, researchers have found that the feedback time lag can lead to negative results on tests. Homework also risks emotional breakdowns, fights and arguments, parental resentment and interference, and greatly increased stress. It narrows the focus down to what is going on in the part of the classroom where the student is sitting, and as the future education of our young charges involve workshops, cooperative learning, and thinking about thinking, missing out on the growth of a concept to fully understand how to transfer it causes a drop in understanding. In this light, homework is seen as an obstacle in our home to the goals we set for our children and we are ready to move past it for a better solution to enrich our next generation’s educational development.

4. Effective Homework Strategies

Individual homework problems are a valuable source of feedback and information in the instructional process. Therefore, homework is often given feedback and evaluated. If a teacher uses homework to evaluate what students have learned, homework grading is also graded on completion. But such assessment of homework can be an extremely slow process. Ideally, homework is promptly returned to students. If students stayed with materials and concepts being taught, homework can be a valuable link back to the material of instruction, or even a new lead-in to the next lesson. The more precisely teachers respond to different reasons for student noncompliance with homework, the more effective homework can be as a means of instruction.

Conventional homework comprises problems or tasks that accompany out-of-class readings of study. Numerous other meanings of the term are also used, such as practice assignments, ready homework forwarded to homework, or further jobs or tasks accomplished independently of the classroom instruction. When immediately led to by classroom instruction common sets of problems or writing assignments are conventional homework. Similar duties that are not immediately connected to classroom instruction are unrelated jobs. Also between task types, distinctions can be made. Tasks used to practice carrying out assignments students are already capable of performing are ready homework. New material is applied to complete assignments students have not experienced yet. Propagation homework problems involve progressing of several individuals, sometimes presented to students as a result of their own work, and network homework problems involve detailed trading of information among classmates.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

The goal of homework is to improve student learning by providing a comprehensive review and readjustment of material. Regulatory compliance with policy appears to be an important contributing mechanism by which homework impacts student learning outcomes. And students who earn higher grades spend more time on homework. Recommendations for improving the effectiveness of homework focus on the design of homework assignments and providing careful descriptions of homework expectations. More attention should be given by faculty who use undergraduate teaching assistants to the training and instruction for homework expectations and grading as their approaches do not appear to be as effective as those of faculty only using graduate teaching assistants.

While it would be a major policy change to require instructors to assign homework, a universally applied approach would be to require a homework noncompliance penalty in introductory-level natural science and engineering courses. To assess this approach by determining the relative student response in courses taught both with and without a homework necessitating a noncompliance penalty appears to be clearly validated by the growing body of evidence demonstrating its effectiveness. The analysis further supports the positive influence of homework on student learning performance and homework as a necessary study tool for high-performing students. Finally, evidence is consistent with improved employment prospects for those students who complete engineering degrees.