October 2007 — News

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Homework: A Math Dilemma and What To Do About It

by Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.

Getting HW Done
Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering (2007) provided the following research-based homework guidelines to help ensure that homework is completed and appropriate:

  • Assign purposeful homework.  Legitimate purposes for homework include introducing new content, practicing a skill or process that students can do independently but not fluently, elaborating on information that has been addressed in class to deepen students' knowledge, and providing opportunities to explore topics of their own interest.
  • [E]nsure that homework is at the appropriate level of difficulty.  Students should be able to complete homework assignments independently with relative high success rates, but they should still find the assignments challenging enough to be interesting.
  • Involve parents in appropriate ways (for example, as a sounding board to help students summarize what they learned from the homework) without requiring parents to act as teachers or to police students' homework completion.
  • Carefully monitor the amount of homework assigned so that it is appropriate to students' age levels and does not take too much time away from other home activities. (p. 78).

A rule of thumb for homework might be that "all daily homework assignments combined should take about as long to complete as 10 minutes multiplied by the students' grade level" and "when required reading is included as a type of homework, the 10-minute rule might be increased to 15 minutes" (Cooper, 2007, cited in Marzano & Pickering, 2007, p. 77).  Other tips for getting homework done can be found in Helping Your Students with Homework, a 1998 booklet based on educational research from the United States Department of Education. 

Differentiation, Reality, and Student Satisfaction
Yes, varying homework, creating a tiered assignment structure based on student interests and abilities, and being flexible in homework completion schedules are among differentiated strategies that add to the complexity of teaching. Planning differentiated homework takes more time than assigning problems out of a text, just as planning for differentiated instruction takes time with its different class management techniques, flexible grouping, and teaching beyond the traditional lecture to a group of students sitting in straight rows. Planning is best done in collaboration with teaching colleagues who also develop a corresponding enhanced grading scheme, including rubrics.

Realistically, differentiation of any kind is difficult to sustain when math class sizes tend to be large and when there are so many demands on teachers for preparing students for standardized testing. Implementing differentiated homework means getting to know your students better than you might now, and having them and parents understand a different view of "fairness," particularly for grading purposes. Everyone might be doing the same amount of homework, but that homework might not be the same for all, all the time. Imagine the difference for students who will no longer need to complain, as did the 11-year-old daughter of the editor of this site, "Twenty-nine annoying exponent problems are 29 too many."