How can homework help students

Discussions and feedback about what is being implemented and how it will affect the practice of the teacher are essential. Changing the way teachers receive feedback and are asked to practice new, targeted skills offers the model for what you ask them to do with their students.

Consider being a model of the change. Resource: Ericsson, A. Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The opinions expressed in Leadership are strictly those of the author s and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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If you expect your child to be well educated, you have the responsibility of making sure your child gets educated, starting at home, with some basic fundamentals. A parent is a child's first and most important teacher, which is why the No Child Left Behind Act of recognizes parents' vital role in education.

Printable view. They also believe that doing homework fosters responsibility and organizational skills, and that doing well on homework tasks contributes to learning, even if children experience frustration from time to time.

Many parents provide support by establishing homework routines, eliminating distractions, communicating expectations, helping children manage their time, providing reassuring messages, and encouraging kids to be aware of the conditions under which they do their best work. These supports help foster the development of self-regulation, which is critical to school success.

As children move into higher grades, these skills and strategies help them organize, plan, and learn independently. Especially in the early grades, homework gives parents the opportunity to cultivate beliefs and behaviors that foster efficient study skills and academic resilience.

Indeed, across age groups, there is a strong and positive relationship between homework completion and a variety of self-regulatory processes. However, the quality of parental help matters. Parents who maintain a positive outlook on homework and allow their children room to learn and struggle on their own, stepping in judiciously with informational feedback and hints, do their children a much better service than those who seek to control the learning process. The former included the belief that parents encouraged the children to try to find the right answer on their own before providing them with assistance, and when the child struggled, attempted to understand the source of the confusion.

In contrast, the latter included the perception that parents provided unsolicited help, interfered when the children did their homework, and told them how to complete their assignments. Supportive help predicted higher achievement, while intrusive help was associated with lower achievement.

Children are more likely to focus on self-improvement during homework time and do better in school when their parents are oriented toward mastery.

In contrast, if parents focus on how well children are doing relative to peers, kids tend to adopt learning goals that allow them to avoid challenge. Social class is another important element in the homework dynamic. What is the homework experience like for families with limited time and resources? And what of affluent families, where resources are plenty but the pressures to succeed are great? Poorer families also have fewer financial resources to devote to home computers, tutoring, and academic enrichment.

In fact, parental help with homework is not a necessary component for school success. Students said their immigrant parents rarely engaged in activities that are known to foster academic achievement, such as monitoring homework, checking it for accuracy, or attending school meetings or events.

In a related vein, a recent analysis of survey data showed that Asian and Latino 5th graders, relative to native-born peers, were more likely to turn to siblings than parents for homework help. One study found that mothers enjoyed the routine and predictability of homework and used it as a way to demonstrate to children how to plan their time. Mothers organized homework as a family activity, with siblings doing homework together and older children reading to younger ones.

In this way, homework was perceived as a collective practice wherein siblings could model effective habits and learn from one another. In another recent study, researchers examined mathematics achievement in low-income 8th-grade Asian and Latino students. Help with homework was an advantage their mothers could not provide. They could, however, furnish structure for example, by setting aside quiet time for homework completion , and it was this structure that most predicted high achievement.

The homework narrative at the other end of the socioeconomic continuum is altogether different. Media reports abound with examples of students, mostly in high school, carrying three or more hours of homework per night, a burden that can impair learning, motivation, and well-being.

In affluent communities, students often experience intense pressure to cultivate a high-achieving profile that will be attractive to elite colleges. Heavy homework loads have been linked to unhealthy symptoms such as heightened stress, anxiety, physical complaints, and sleep disturbances. Fortunately, some national intervention initiatives, such as Challenge Success co-founded by Pope , are heightening awareness of these problems. What is good for this small segment of students, however, is not necessarily good for the majority.

My colleagues and I analyzed interviews conducted with lower-income 9th graders African American, Mexican American, and European American from two Northern California high schools that at the time were among the lowest-achieving schools in the state. We found that these students consistently described receiving minimal homework—perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night.

And most have gotten little training in how and why to assign homework. Even if teachers do manage to assign effective homework, it may not show up on the measures of achievement used by researchers—for example, standardized reading test scores. Those tests are designed to measure general reading comprehension skills, not to assess how much students have learned in specific classes.

Good homework assignments might have helped a student learn a lot about, say, Ancient Egypt. The research relied on by those who oppose homework has actually found it has a modest positive effect at the middle and high school levels—just not in elementary school. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.

A study that looked specifically at math homework , for example, found it boosted achievement more in elementary school than in middle school—just the opposite of the findings on homework in general. That seems to run counter to another frequent objection to homework, which is that it privileges kids who are already advantaged.

While those things may be true, not assigning homework—or assigning ineffective homework—can end up privileging advantaged students even more.