Quantifying Homework: How Much Is Too Much?

I know most parents prefer seeing their children working on their assignments than bounce around with nothing to do. I the meantime am the most precious commodity in our lives and every minute spent working is better than using it watching TV or following what’s trending on Twitter.

Well, we often make a sincere mistake of equating productivity and huge piles of homework assignments. This is wrong. Other than asking why teachers haven’t assigned your kids enough homework for the weekend, we should direct the focus on whether our kids are getting quality homework assignments. 

Does this sound like Greek to you? Just read on, I’ll expound more on this topic later in this article.

Does homework help students learn?

Over the years, homework has proven to be more beneficial, but only if proper guidelines are followed. For instance, these take-away assignments are widely known to reinforce what has already been learned in class during school hours, enhance retention of knowledge through improved memorization exercise, promote parental involvement, and even boost grades.

Homework critics, on the other hand, make substantive claims that homework poses great health threats that we can’t just ignore. This is where now educators get challenges to circumvent. They have to determine the best approaches and make the homework culture more productive every time they assign it. Students, in their turn, sometimes need to hire a professional economics homework helper, if they don't understand how to do the assignments on their own.

Despite having the “10-minute” homework guidelines, many teachers still struggle to establish the appropriate amount of assignment to assign every night. The real woe is in finding a balance between too challenging and too easy. Either way, this compromises the quality of homework making them ineffective.

Getting to know the struggles that teachers have to overcome when assigning homework helps many cut them some slack. Whereas experts continue to insist that so long as an assignment promotes student engagement, it is capable of improving their grades at the end of the term. 

So, how much homework is acceptable?

While there is no specific number of how many assignments, projects, questions, problems, or essays should be given for kids to tackle every night, we tend to focus more on the teachers' initial intentions.

This basis works by evaluating teachers’ deliberateness in giving particular homework assignments. Is it aimed at benefiting students in the long run or is it just for the sake of issuing homework? Are some of the parameters that we consider during evaluations. 

Other metrics revolve around how challenging the assignments are and the provision of feedback. At Whitby, we insist on timely feedback as it helps correct mistakes as it happens. This way, students don’t get to commit the same errors repeatedly. Moreover, it helps us to identify specific areas that are challenging for students. 

This kind of information derived from homework informs key decisions especially that of considering another effective teaching approach such as using videos. By covering a chapter on their own back at home, kids get the chance to engage in constructive discussions and ask questions during class time. 

This type of homework greatly improves students’ comprehension levels and it would be okay to use different variations of it. Just make sure not to overdo it as it might quickly become boring. Experiment around by assigning alternate forms of assignments and ensure that they can be finished within reasonable times.

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