Is Homework Helpful or Harmful to Students

Homework has been around for a very long time. It is set and traced as a tradition of having teachers assigning work and students completing it. Parents say that teachers require it; teachers say that parents demand more of it. Teachers assign homework to help some students improve their grade and pass the course for those of who do not do well on tests or standardized examinations. Schools require a certain amount of hours of homework to be assigned to each student. When students bring back work to be done at home, many controversies arise. Many families have enough work to do without adding a full night of homework on top of it. Stress, arguments and time frustrations can encase the family with problems. Can homework be considered helpful or harmful to students? This controversy turns into arguments and disagreements. Assigning homework satisfies various educational needs and serves as an intellectual discipline, establishes study habits, eases time constraints on the amount of curricular material that can be covered in class, and supplements and reinforces work done in school. Homework is defined as an out of class task assigned to students to help them practice and prepare for their future. Yet very many families believe school work should not be sent home and say it becomes a burden in their family.

Situations that include family structure and responsibilities, family income, student employment, and access to instructional help or access to computers can enhance or impede a student's ability or opportunity to do homework. Parents and families must come into the situation when their child is required to complete homework, for many families however, there is no time available to do this. Some students refuse to do their homework and studies show that students drop out of school or are expelled due to homework pressure and their inability to do it.

Parents who are already involved in doing homework with their children might notice a very important element in their approach to homework. A learning disability can be exposed which without homework might not have been discovered. Most parents welcome homework; they see it as a chance to monitor their child's progress at school. Just because the "typical student" has a small amount of homework doesn't mean that there aren't other students struggling to complete their assignments. Quite a lot of students do not complete their homework. There are many reasons why and sometimes these reasons may not be obvious, therein hard to fix. Occasionally, the reasons are not even thought of as a problem for the student but as a problem with the school and its teachers. Homework is not the cause of learning problems in students. While students with learning disabilities take longer to complete work at home, teachers and parents might never know about this disability because the parents are not involved or the teacher is too busy, or by all means, the child just expects his homework load to be of a larger magnitude than other students. Homework can be seen as an instructional tool with many underlying principles to support it. These include enhancing discipline, organizing time, evaluating student knowledge, and engaging parents in the students schooling. Without homework many students would be struggling today to complete their assignments. Homework is a vital key to success throughout high school.

Schools and teachers are beginning to voice their concerns that class time is to be spent on review and preparation for standardized tests so the classroom curriculum has to be finished at home. So homework is assigned, often on a daily basis, to students of all ages all over the world. Every child is different, and so are their learning styles. Each person has a unique sense of receiving and maintaining information. Everybody has a distinctive combination of strengths and weaknesses on elements that reflect various aspects of the environmental, emotional, sociological, and physical conditions under which a person acquires new knowledge and skills. The environmental element includes the preference for high or low lighting; emotional elements include the extent to how one has motivation to start and the persistence to complete homework (including the source of motivation, such as their parents, teachers, or self); and sociological elements include the time of day when one likes to learn and their preferred auditory or visual perceptual channel is operative. Researchers summarized the finding of a large number of studies demonstrating that when children were allowed to learn in school under conditions that matched their learning style preferences, their academic achievements and their attitudes toward school improved. Home environments; student characteristics, subject matter, and grade level all influence the effect of homework on student achievement. Although the variety among every child's preferred learning style is evident, there is disagreement as to whether efforts should be made to change or expand students learning preferences to conform to classroom instructions or to adapt to the students particular strengths.

Sandra Hofferth at the Institute of Social Research in the University of Michigan conducted a survey of 3,600 children in 1981 and again in 1997. The study surveyed the amount of time in minutes spent studying homework, playing organized sports, and watching TV. The ages of the children ranged from 3 years old to 11 years old. A total of each category, in 1981 and then in 1997, students were found studying 225 minutes to 376 minutes, respectively, each week. Organized sports contributed 400 minutes in '81 and 768 minutes in '97. Watching TV pulled in an extensive 2666 minutes in 1981 and 2382 minutes in 1997. Students spent a vast amount of time watching TV and a considerably less amount of time studying homework. The amount of weekly time devoted to studying increased from one hour and 53 minutes (7 minutes a day) in 1981 to two hours and 16 minutes (18 minutes a day) in 1997; this was an increase of 23 minutes a week. The 13 and a half hours that children continue to devote to television each week is more than six times the amount of time spent studying. Hofferth, from the University of Michigan, says that kids are sleeping, going to school, playing, eating, attending to personal care, participating in sports, going to day care, shopping, visiting, and working around the house more than studying homework, so she finds homework is more of a passive leisure activity. Parents should be aware of this data, especially those who have children doing up to and beyond 3 hours per night. Those students who spend hours at night completing homework should be closely observed, for they might have a learning disability. This problem can be taken care of through parental participation.

Neo-conservative Newt Gingrich, former speaker

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