Homework - good or bad?

[Valka D'Ur]

I tended to breeze through most of my homework in high school - since I got a lot of it done during lunch breaks or after school, when not working in the library.

College was a different thing, though - as just about every last instructor seemed to think that THAT course was the ONLY course we should be concerned with, and they didn't want to hear any crap about "but remember, we have 4 other courses (some people took as many as 7 courses per semester)".

Sure, sometimes I stayed up until 3 a.m. doing my physical geography homework (finishing the lab assignments that didn't get done in class) - but at least that class was fun - and the instructor was willing to be flexible with our assignments as long as they were turned in by noon the next day, unlike most other instructors.

 

[BvBPL]

Homework, at least on the grade school level, can be a critical part of the educational process.

Several years ago, as an undergrad, I took a class on Class & Society focusing principally on inequity between the classes. As part of this, we read a study by a research that contrasted the experiences of those involved in a high performing school made up principally of affluent students and that of a low performing school made up mainly of lower class students. The study looked at not just the educational institution, but also the relationship between the school and the home life of the students.

The research found that there was a significant relationship between how the parents of the students interacted with their employment work and how the students interacted with their school work. In both cases, the parents saw the student’s “job” as being to learn at school. The differences between the high performing school’s parents and the low-performing school’s parents in how those parents interacted with their own employment colored the relationship between the students and the school.

The homes of the high performing students had parents that were largely salaried professionals. These parents frequently took their work home with them. For them, work did not end at the five o’clock bell and instead infused itself both into the home life and the greater social life of the family outside the home in that these parents generally socialized with people related to their work. In contrast, the parents of the students in the low performing school were largely paid on an hourly wage and had jobs that did not extend themselves into the parents’ home life.

This affected the way the parents saw their children’s relationship with the school. Parents of students at the high performing school saw education as a holistic activity and integrated that activity into their home life whereas parents at the low performing school largely saw education as schooling that was limited to the hours the child was in school. Parents at the high performing school would develop learning activities around the home that fed upon the lessons the children learned in school whereas the parents at the low performing school largely left development of educational lessons to the teachers.

Based upon this, the researcher theorized that the high performing school did so well at least in part because of the integration between school life and home life that modeled the parents’ integration of their work life with their home life. The researcher also cited other differences that may contribute such as the interaction between parents and teachers as to whether one party treats the other as an expert, a peer, or a subordinate, and other factors, but this one seemed the most relevant to homework.

The researcher also studied the relationship between the parents and their children’s homework. In the high performing school’s homes, the parents regularly worked with children to complete their homework. Indeed, parents would often expand upon the lessons taught in the homework and modify problems to further reinforce the core listens of the homework. In the home of students going to the low performing schools, the parents often felt they were unable to help their children with the homework in large part because the parents felt the homework was more complex then the parents were able to understand (many had limited education and few had college degrees) and because the parents felt it was the teachers’ job to provide instruction, not the parents.

I would like to stress that the differences in relationship between the parents at the high performing school and those at the low performing school could not be chalked up to differences in parental involvement in school nor with the relative value the parents placed upon their children’s education. The low performing school had a high level of parental involved, but that involvement was of a type different than the involvement than that of the high performing school’s parents. Furthermore, the parents of students at the low performing school placed a very high value on their children’s education and recognized that education was a critical part of their children’s success as adults.

In light of this research, I am in favor of homework for primary and secondary students. However, such homework should be geared towards integrating school with the students’ home lives. In particular, such homework would ideally require parental involvement on some level. Mere rote work is generally less helpful than asking a student to apply the lessons learned at school within the home. Furthermore, schools that have a lot of parents with limited education should probably steer away from things like New Math that may pose unnecessary barriers between homework and parental involvement in homework.

 

[uppi]

Homework should just be suggested (i.e. students work on what they need practice with) readings and/or problems that help with understanding concepts.

This.

There is some level of maturity, at which students should be expected to manage their time on their own and be able to decide for themselves whether they have mastered a topic or still need more practice. Additionally, taking away the requirement to turn in the homework (or even worse, grading it, which is in my opinion a very bad idea) enables learning groups and team work without all the problems that graded team work has.

 

[civver_764]

My objection is not so much with homework as with our authoritarian education system. Voluntarily doing exercises can be very helpful when you're trying to learn something.

 

[Hygro]

Most all homework I did prior to middle school was a useless invasion of stress and misery. In middle school it helped me find scholastic rhythm but mostly still sucked. In 7th grade our homework was whatever we didn't finish in class and I thought that was fair.

In high school homework often made sense, but only when it was done well.

Overall I think homework trends unnecessary and oppressive.

 

[Kozmos]

I've got to take the side of the professors here, only because when I was in University I had TONS of assignments.

I had to build a goddamn operating system that fair enough was running on simulated hardware, but nevertheless, it was built up from scratch. Every freaking day I'd be in the lab after classes, well into the night. Computer graphics class? Same thing, I had to build the goddamn graphics pipeline from scratch. Compilers? Build a goddamn compiler from scratch.

Did I get all of my assignments done? Hell no, there wasn't enough time. This was all on top of advanced level calculus, statistics, linear algebra, logic..

Should everyone else have to suffer at least 50% as much as I did? I did so it's only fair.

Homework in highschool and earlier years was a joke and mostly had to do with repetitive nonsense that didn't require too much thought, but I'm probably misremembering because I'm a bit full of myself right now as you can tel.

You had complete lab access all night? That's amazing. Where did you study? Our labs are open only on certain days and hours when not in use which can be frustrating when you need to work in relative peace or require decent hardware/special software.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Homework in general needs to develop sensitivity calculation skills better and understanding limiting parameters

While that is a STEM focused answer i fully believe it extends to all fields

I know what you're talking about and agree for STEM students this applies. It's much more helpful to me to have practice solving problems that teach me what kinds of answers to expect in a given situation. So for example, I need to know that the expected DeltaV from a certain type of maneuver is going to be in the hundreds of meters/s range rather than hundreds of kilometer/s range.

The kinds of problems that are exactly 0 help to me are:
Derive this equation from first principles. I mean, it only took a group of scientists a hundred years to figure that one out but you should get it done by Thursday amirite?
Those kinds of things just don't help anyone except the few kids who love that sort of thing. The rest of us roll our eyes, copy the file and wait for the teacher to explain where and how we'll use those equations.

At my university I almost get no homework to be honest.

That said, I more or less agree with Antilogic. I don't really have much against homework, what I do have issue with is excess amounts of homework and study because teachers and/or professors don't realize that students take other classes.

I wonder about this because I'm sure professor know good and well we have other classes. They just don't care or they fail to understand the workload they put students under. For me, this semester has been a nightmare - not that the material is extraordinarily difficult - but because I have no work/life balance right now. I'm working weekends on homework and long, long nights just because there is so much homework assigned on top of regular studying that needs to be done.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The studies I've read show that homework really does nothing to help students learn. Students assigned no homework do just as well as those assigned a lot of homework. Parental involvement in education does help, but that doesn't mean that homework is a good idea. In fact, having the better educated and generally more affluent parents help with homework is an argument against homework, as it means that the system is unfair to those from poorer backgrounds and would tend to reduce social mobility.

Flipping homework and school work is generally a good idea.



When I was in school, the best teachers typically assigned reading for homework and then began class with a brief review of the previous night's readings. Next they would encourage the students to ask questions about any parts they had trouble understanding, and try to clarify those points. They would then assign classwork which would never be collected until at least a day later. The work was enough that even the smartest students would have to work efficiently to finish it before the end of class. There would normally, but not always, be some left to be completed as homework. There was no worrying about any stigma attached to not finishing in time, only an incentive to work quickly in order to have more free time later. The students were encouraged to get help from one another and could ask the teacher for hints, but the assignments were never considered group work. We were strongly discouraged from divvying up assignments into parts for different individuals to work on separately. Each individual had to do the whole assignment in his or her own handwriting. Sometimes the assignments were collected and graded, and sometimes not. Sometimes we would be told beforehand whether they would be graded, but often not.


The best of my high school teachers (whom I had for Geometry during Freshman year and AP Calculus BC during Senior year) had a policy where the home/classwork was strongly encouraged but never exactly required. Tests were the only things that counted towards a student's grade in the class. (Actually, come to think of it, I think that attendance and participation in class discussions may have contributed something like 10% of the grade too.) Every test question would be very similar to a question that had been assigned as class/homework. (A couple times the questions were actually identical, although she usually changed the numbers a bit.) There was a deadline to turn in the assignments in order to get them back with her corrections and feedback in time to use them to study for the next test. When she graded the tests, she didn't really care whether or how we showed or work so long as the answers were exactly right. However, she made most of the test questions hard enough that exactly right answers were rare and few students could have passed the class without getting a lot of partial credit. She would not give any partial credit for wrong answers on tests for those students who had not turned in the relevant home/classwork assignments. She was otherwise generous with partial credit, sometimes even giving credit out based on how well the student did on the equivalent homework question even if the student did not do anything right on the test question itself.




In college, classes were mostly lectures and homework was almost always completely separate from class. Homework was usually given in very large batches. It was extremely rare for us to get any feedback on how we did on the homework in time for it to be of any use in studying for the tests. Some professors did not care about homework at all, while others cared a great deal.

One professor had a policy of automatically where he would not allow any student to pass his class without a passing grade on absolutely everything in the class. Failing a single test, protect, lab report, or homework assignment meant automatically failing the class. We would not accept any assignments more than two days late, and took off enough points that something turned in even one day late was unlikely to get a passing grade. (I dropped both classes I had with him, because I was late on a lab report in one and a homework assignment in the other.)

I don't think that the methods used in college worked as well.

 

[Zelig]

You had complete lab access all night? That's amazing. Where did you study? Our labs are open only on certain days and hours when not in use which can be frustrating when you need to work in relative peace or require decent hardware/special software.

Canada, I also had lab access 24/7. I actually did an entire semester while living in dorms without a PC, I just walked over to a lab anytime I needed a computer.

 

[Tahuti]

I'm in favour of less homework overall, but also of having most homework graded. Grading homework provides you an incentive to do it and make it easier to learn for exams. Then again, I'm also opposed to having to having pass all homework in order to pass the entire course, since you should be able to compensate by your exam results (or vice versa).

 

[IAM]

What are your thoughts on homework in general terms? Does your opinion differ much between grade school and university-level?

I have mixed feelings on homework. I think it's important practice overall but can also be abused (obvious hyperbole alert!) by professors at the university level. It becomes an issue when professors forget that their students have other classes than the one they teach and load their students down with overly long or numerous assignments.
I've been running into that a lot this semester. I will say it's only really a problem when professors start doing things like handing out two homework assignments at the same time and giving the class only 2 days turn around time. That's also happened a lot to me this semester and it becomes a grind.

Then there is professors who write homework assignments as if they were tests. By this I mean long assignments with multi-multi-part problems ( Problem 1 might have part A) B) C) and D) which each having parts i) ii) iii) ). That gets to be overwhelming and couple that with 2 day turn-around and it gets ridiculous. A standard excuse about 2 day turn arounds or long assignments is that 'we are behind' or 'we have to cover a lot' and so on. It's not the student's fault that the professor has time-management issues and they should not have to pay for that. I'm not saying they necessarily need to make every assignment a cake-walk, but they should be conscientious of the students time as well.

File systems also skew everything related to homework. If you aren't familiar, file systems are where Greek houses (or groups of friends) have access to files on classes where all the past homeworks and exams are available, which allows students with access to the files to breeze by and just copy last year's answers (which more often than not are this years answers as well). What are your thoughts on file systems?

Ungraded homework is just evil in my opinion.

Some good points. I have never cheated in school so any system to get the answers from someone else I would not do. I hate ungraded homework also. In lower grades there is more emphasis on easy to grade answers like dates. I think that general time period information is important but the why's are much more important.

One thing I liked to do to ease the load was to pre-read books for University classes. Professors will often assign several books for a class, usually at least one that they have written, and they usually assign the same books semester after semester. You could pick up some of these at the beginning of summer or winter break and read and highlight them taking notes. That can give you an edge in the class. Remember though sometimes they will assign 6 books for the class and then never even refer to a couple of them the entire semester, but if you can interject information from some of these books in essay questions it may be worth a few points to show you actually read the books.

edit: another resource to use is talk to people that took the class already under different instructors. In lower level courses you may have an option of who to take courses from or at least be better prepared for what is to come. Sit up front and find the smartest people in class to study with.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I abhor the file system entirely. However, professors are too lazy and/or busy to change their assignments from semester to semester which makes the whole thing work. It also gives a MASSIVE advantage to Greeks and those with access so much so that if you don't have access, you better get it or you can find yourself at the bottom of the class even if you are smarter than everyone else.

it isn't considered cheating, however, which is why it is allowed. But it does drive grade inflation something fierce and allows students to not learn the required subjects. They just copy down hw answers and memorize test problems.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

what I do have issue with is excess amounts of homework and study because teachers and/or professors don't realize that students take other classes.

Homework (which I am taking to mean any assignment that is not a written paper, presentation, or a test/quiz that is intended to be completed out of class) is good if it forces you to practice the skills required to master the subject but bad if such an excess is assigned students cannot complete it within a reasonable amount of time and still sleep at night.

I don't get this criticism. I didn't have to do every assigned question for physics if I already understood the concept. I'd just skip to another question that gave me the practice I needed.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't get this criticism. I didn't have to do every assigned question for physics if I already understood the concept. I'd just skip to another question that gave me the practice I needed.

If you were forced to do a lot of homework you didn't actually need because it was graded (and a significant part of your overall grade) then you'd get it I think.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Like Camikaze, I'd define that as "assignments" and not homework.