Journal 3

Trautwein, Ulrich, et al. "Between-Teacher Differences In Homework Assignments And The Development Of Students' Homework Effort, Homework Emotions, And Achievement."Journal Of Educational Psychology 101.1 (2009): 176-189. PsycARTICLES. Web. 9 Oct. 2014.

This article begins about why teachers assign homework. Most assign "drill and practice" assignments to deepen the knowledge of the topic. Another reason is to make the gap between lower and higher achieving students smaller by hoping the lower achieving students benefit from the homework. This research was deigned to examine student homework effort, emotions about homework, and student achievement based on teachers' homework objectives, assignments, and attitude toward parental involvement. It was based on 8th grade students in a mathematics class. This study resulted in the fact that how students react to homework is based on how teachers think about and assign homework. High amounts of assigned "drill and practice" homework led to negative levels of achievement. Homework that promoted self-regulation and motivation had the best achievement rates. 

This article directly looked at a math class, while my first article directly looked at math and science, and my second article looked at all four main subjects (english, social studies, math, science). My first two articles both proved that homework can be beneficial to students' achievement in school, but this article proved that it could be harmful (when too much "drill and practice" homework is assigned). My first article used stated that the idea of homework needs to be reevaluated, and then it could become more beneficial to students. This article agrees with that saying that homework is beneficial based on how the teachers view it and assign it. Then, that affects student motivation and effort. This article also brings a new school subject to my research. 

This article actually concluded with what I believed about the subject. I believe that homework can be beneficial based on how it is assigned and how much is assigned. This article says that too much "drill and practice" homework can affect students negatively, but the right amount can be beneficial. I agree that "drill and practice" is good because it reinforces the idea/topic, but too much of it can be a bad thing. This article does bring new ideas to the table, though. Both of my articles before looked at home having or not having homework affected the final grade, but this article looked at how homework was assigned affected the grade. Some strategies worked much better than others, and this affected the students' overall achievement in the class. The study said that homework assigned that made students use self-regulation and motivation, like homework, best helped the students. Although, this study did not have a control group of students with no assigned homework, so we do not really see how beneficial some strategies were/were not based on not having homework for the course. 

Like I said, this article brings a new topic to the discussion. It is not if homework is/is not assigned, but how it is assigned to help benefit students' academic achievement. So, my newest question is if this applies for all subjects in school, not just foreign language? This article kind of defeats my entire purpose of my initial question "is homework necessary to academic achievement of secondary school students?" So, I do not know how beneficial this article is to my research, but it does give me some usable research. For example, homework assigned that helps self-regulate and motivate students is very beneficial to grades, while a lot of "drill and practice" homework is negative to students. I am still looking for answers to the question of my last article about graded homework affecting final grades and optional homework.