October 2007 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Homework: A Math Dilemma and What To Do About It
Options
Mastery. Compacting, which is giving students credit for what they already know, makes sense when you consider that students learn at different rates. Technology resources can help with mastery, individualizing homework, and enabling teachers, students, and parents to monitor the time spent on homework and degree of accuracy that students achieve on a particular problem set for developing computation skills and procedural knowledge. (Wouldn't it be great if that online textbook had that monitoring capability?) Those sets can be randomly generated or developed from large databases of similar problems geared to a specific benchmark of a lesson.
For fixed problem sets in which students appear to have attained little mastery after a certain number of attempts (perhaps two), students might write or even record audio about what they do and don't know so that the teacher might better address the concept during the following class lesson. This latter promotes thinking about mathematics, tells the student that his/her thinking is valued, and would also minimize the frustrations that parents experience when attempting to "do" homework for and/or with their children. Given that honest effort, the student would have flex time to continue working on the assignment to develop the required skills. Of course, there are sites for homework assistance, and teachers should make appropriate sites available. Some include tutorials; others will generate the answer to a problem submitted. However, consider some of those a short-term solution to just getting homework done.
Understanding. An assignment might include addressing an essential question of the day or the unit, which the student would write about in a journal. Students can also develop a variety of thinking maps (e.g., see mapthemind.com) as a way to visually express their content understanding (Lipton & Hyerle, n.d.). An ability to explain a concept to oneself or others shows understanding, as would an ability to develop examples and non-examples of the concept or show how it visually relates across other themes.
Interpersonal and Self-Expressive. Using online resources and virtual manipulatives at home or in a school-based after-school homework setting can further assist with concept development, collaboration, and peer discussions. An at home investigation might involve discussion with parents and friends about a real world event in which the topic of the day would apply, thus enhancing the interpersonal style of learning math. These discussions and such activities as virtual field trips and Web quests might also help establish the link of mathematics to other subjects: science, literature, art, music, sports, and daily life (e.g., cooking, shopping, investments, savings, home decorating, construction). I've also had students use e-mail or instant messenger to discuss homework with each other.
