Does homework make you smarter?

Research has repeatedly suggested that homework does very little in improving student performance or their general academic excellence. This information has contentiously been cited by several educators and schools to be the main basis as to why they purportedly chose to do away with homework.

Many of the institutions that have largely been affected by this include those serving elementary level students. Since homework does not increase their grades or influence their performance, they have decided to adopt other means of learning to spark creativity and innovativeness among their students. These include things like engaging in unstructured plays and reading for pleasure.

While critics continue to insist that homework plays a big role in getting parents involved in their children’s schoolwork, there is still a need to interrogate such research findings that are quickly becoming popular in decision-making. Despite homework being such a hot topic, experts have analyzed and figured out that there are specific forms of homework that can greatly determine one’s success.

One type is the retrieval practice that cocoons around the old saying, “practice makes perfect” but with a slight twist. This largely refers to the process of trying to recall information that you might have learned at some point in time and not in the recent past. For instance, let’s say that you learned a specific concept at the beginning of the term, and then you are asked to provide similar information at the close of the term to evaluate how much you can remember without referring to your books.

One factor as to why homework isn’t productive as it should be is because teachers might have forgotten their practice of giving effective homework. This can be looked at as a grey area that most of these research studies did not focus on.

Ultimately, homework offers an opportunity to practice a random knowledge or skill gained whereas tests are specific. For example, when assigned a reading passage for a term paper covering Ancient Egypt, the student gets to practice their reading skills and gain further knowledge on the subject. However, when the reading passage in their tests asks for Ancient Greek, they might not be able to display what they had learned. Most of these research findings did not consider this in their survey.

Depending on how you look at it, these studies also differ in their conclusions. For example, a study done on math tests and scores alone discredited the finding that homework is essentially useless for elementary school students. This particular study was specific ad found out that homework boosted student performance in math.

Another research that generally found out that parental involvement during homework hurts student achievement was also discredited by a specific study that found out that this interaction was helpful especially for the less privileged students who had no access to resources.

To answer whether homework makes you smarter depends on several factors that need to be addressed first. You can start by evaluating the type of homework assigned, its purpose, teacher’s intention, and retention capacity.