How Homework Helps
Homework and Test Preparation
Like athletes maintaining their conditioning, students preparing for entrance exams need to put in study time on a regular basis. How much time depends on every student’s goals and schedules; this post will focus on how students can improve the lasting impact of their study sessions.
Let’s start by differentiating between learning and practice. Learning, which involves introducing and explaining new and unfamiliar concepts, takes place during tutoring and classroom sessions. Practice, the reinforcement of such new information, takes place at home. This is the goal of homework.
Here are three ideas to consider when planning homework sessions.
1. Remind yourself what you’ve learned. It takes more than one lesson or homework session to master any concept. Instead of having a single “Right Triangle” homework session, refer back to what you’ve learned about 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles throughout your prep. If you’ve first seen Right Triangles on January 9, you’ll need to do Right Triangle homework problems not only the week of January 9, but also throughout January and February. After you’ve done the content homework in your Bespoke book, you can do problems that test the same content in your test’s Official Guide.
2. Test yourself. Looking at information on the written page is less effective at increasing long-term mastery than demanding the brain to recite something it’s learned. Part of this is accomplished every time you do a homework problem – another way to increase understanding is to recite strategies and properties you’ve learned out loud: “In Identifying Sentence Error questions, comparisons must be both logical and parallel;” “When reading a Reading Comprehension passage for the first time, identify Main Idea and author’s point of view.” If you can recite the concept, you’ll use it on Test Day.
3. Mix it up. Do an exam practice section, where different concepts are tested side-by-side. On Test Day, you’ll be ready for that subject diversity.
Great athletes know that a little bit of practice every day is better than a marathon session once a week. As best you can, work test-prep into your daily routine!
This blog post owes its inspiration to the article “The Trouble With Homework,” written by Annie Murphy Paul and appearing in the New York Times on September 10, 2011. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/opinion/sunday/quality-homework-a-smart-idea.html?pagewanted=all).
I think homework is one of those things that can have value if it has value, and can be highly destructive when it is. I believe that what happens is that kids get homework from the earliest years and fit into three general categories. There are those who are extremely bright and do their homework so quickly that they don't really have homework in those early years (since they are actually getting it done in school). There are those in the middle, who put more effort in their assignments at home, may struggle, but get it done. Then, there are those who work slowly and can't do it in a reasonable amount of time. The first group learns to love school and ends up doing well later on. The middle group will have mixed feelings about school, but does okay. It is this latter group, which is not impaired enough to have a true learning disability, but find homework difficult enough that they have an "under the radar" learning problem, or we could even call it a homework disability. The the onslaught of homework assignments, homework problems, teacher-parent conferencing, and lack of success, has a long-term cumulative effect on the kid. I think your comments are good as they pertain to the overall homework debate. Homework may be productive for some kids. But as an across the board policy, I think our approach to homework is doing too many kids more harm than it is doing them good.