15 of 48

Write now Article Tools

Ideally homework is an extension of the day's lesson; homework should be a means of allowing information to stick in a child's brain; homework should be gradual in application.

But is it?

When I reflect my school days this is what I see when I think of homework.
In Math, I often see an imbalance of difficulty and number of problems. Math teachers will often give out 20-30 problems. Of these, 10 will be of introductory level (absolute basics. It's as if the child didn't know anything), another 10 will be of second introductory level (similar to basics but ONE thing will be added) and then the remaining will be of the difficult level.

Whatever happened to medium difficulty? Who knows?. However there most certainly is a rising trend. When I think back to my (highly-ranked-at-math) elementary school, there weren't these sort of discrepancies. There were only about 10 homework problems: 1 on introductory level,2 on secondary introductory level, 4 on medium level, 2 on difficult level and 1 on expert level. Why is it that this proportion is better? There's far less time spent on reviewing the basics that were taught during class. Instead there's more towards the cutoff point of the lesson. Ideally "medium" should be just below where a class lesson left. Difficult and expert level questions are there to allow a student's own thinking to aid in the problem-solving process.

In English, I've seen a rise of essays and reading comprehension. Don't get me wrong, writing essays most definitely helps. However what would help even more is weekly homeworks in grammar. Another type of homework that would help in writing would actually be reading. Now it seems like that should be covered through the reading comprehension homeworks but they are often not. Many schools give out simple-versions of books in order to increase the comprehension rate. However because these books use such normal vocabulary and writing style, comprehension rate certainly does increase, but the ability to understand a work of a different style most certainly decreases. Ideally a student should read books with a more complex writing style than expected. After all, what good is being able to write for a long time and being able to understand simple books the day you're going to be faced with a work that contains complex sentence patterns and requires you to give back short, but stylistic well-written response? It won't be of any use at all because you wouldn't be able to understand the text in the first place,

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Does homework actually improve academic achievement??
We want to hear your view. Write now!