Journal #1

How necessary is homework to high school students' academic achievement?

My first article about how necessary homework is to help high schools students' academic achievement is called "When Is Homework Worth the Time? Evaluating the Association Between Homework and Achievement in High School Science and Math." This article looks directly at homework assigned in math and science classes, and begins by giving us the goals of homework. Both the teacher and the student believe that it will strengthen the students' understanding and help their achievement. This article then looks at past research that has been done, and has been concluded by past researchers that the more time spent on homework, the higher the student's GPA. This did not answer the question about the amount of homework assigned and student achievement. Then, new research was done using 10th grade math and science students. Their academic engagement was reported, and their math and science standardized test scores and their final grade in the class was recorded. The data indicated that completing any amount of science and/or math homework is not associated with a significant improvement of grades. However, students who completed more homework than other students received a higher grade in math, and students who completed more homework than other students received a lower or equivalent grade in science. The researchers believe that homework is not a bad thing, but that the purpose of homework needs to be reevaluated.

This article did change my thinking about homework. Obviously, this article only discussed math and science students, so we cannot really let any other school subjects apply to this article's findings. This article said that the more time spent doing homework, the higher the student's grade is. I don't know if I fully believe this because students can sit there doing homework for hours on end, but then still not understand the material. It is not about how long the student works on homework, but how effective the homework is. I personally remember when I was in the 10th grade, I would sit there for hours doing homework for my biology class, but I still received C's and B's on tests. The homework did not prepare me for what I needed to know for the tests, but rather "extra" material about the content of the class. I'm also slightly confused about the research's conclusion on the data. They said that homework in math and science did not necessarily help students' achievement, but they still believe that homework should be assigned. Yet, I think this is how many people think. They believe that homework may not effect students' success, but it should still be assigned.  (Make sure you're assessing the articles accurately.  From your summary, I got the sense that it's worth assigning home because, even if there's not a huge bump in grades, the students who did complete homework did fare better in the course -- at least in math.)  Nobody wants to risk lower academic achievement just because homework was not assigned. However, I agree with them when they said that the purpose of homework needs to be reevaluated. Although I do not know what they mean by that, I believe that homework should not just be considered "busy work" and it should actually contain material to help students fully understand the concept they learned in class. Many others believe that students already go to school for most of the day, and do not need to have an extended school day doing homework. These people can use this research to prove that homework does not significantly help students' achievement, or that it can even hurt their achievement (like the science grades).

My first question is how homework affects other school subject (social studies, English, etc.) achievement. This question can obviously be answered with more research. I had heard that the only homework that helped grades in certain subjects were math and science, but this article could change my mind. The data proved that more science homework did not help grades. This could be because of the concepts in the homework were not the same concepts given on the test. I personally believe that math homework is necessary (not a significant amount of work) to be able to achieve a higher grade, yet the research from this article does not seem to support that. I did believe that homework in math and science was necessary, but this article does shed some light that I may be wrong. I have many more factors that I would want to play into this. Yes, homework may be a beneficial thing, but what if the student has a ton of homework assigned in all of their classes? How does stress of the workload play into academic achievement? On top of that, I need to learn more about homework in other subjects as it is related to achievement. So, obviously, more research is very needed.

Alyssa -- I think it's very important that you narrow the general scope of your question.  Trying to assess the value of homework in all school subjects is simply too much.  The subjects are too different.  The nature of math homework will never be the same as English or foreign language homework.  While a person could write something about homework in general, it would probably need to be the length of a book.  It's probably a good idea to choose just one subject area; or to choose just one homework type; or to choose just one purpose for assigning homework.  Either way, you're setting yourself up to barely skim the surface rather than offer a very critical, in depth exploration.  Let me know if you'd like to talk about this further during my office hours.