MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

NOTEWORTHY NEWS

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to learn more:

• 1 in 3 kids are now short sighted - how the pandemic impacted our students’ eyes 👀 

• This elementary teacher is moving their class to the forest - and their students are loving it 🌲 

• Want to work from home? The UK’s unorthodox plan might let you in order to boost teacher recruitment 🏠️ 

TECH TALK

My students keep “forgetting” to do their work

Students often forget about their homework due to busy schedules and lack of organization. This leads to incomplete assignments, lower grades, and frustration for both teachers and students.

The Solution: myHomework

This mobile app combines three solutions to this problem - reminders, notifications, and organization tools.

Students can input their own class schedules right into the app. This will help them organize their assignments and deadlines by class, displaying them in the chronological order they need to complete them in.

Students can even color code assignments and set priorities to be even more organized.

Push notifications and reminders are sent out as due dates approach, helping students stay on top of deadlines.

It’s available on Android, iOS and even just the web. The app can also sync with any existing calendar apps and it can even work offline, leaving no room for error.

How About YOUR Classroom?

We’re not advocating for hours of homework here - in fact, not only can this be stressful on a learner, but research advises against it (see our Brainy Bit below). We are advocating for a better system to manage it when it arises.

The skill to independently complete work outside of a usual environment, like their classroom,  is surprisingly a very useful and transferable skill even after students graduate.

So, focus on building this skill, as opposed to just trying to use it as a way to fit in all the missing curriculum. Here’s how:

Strategies:

Introduce myHomework by first guiding students through setting up their own schedules at the start of a semester or new unit (if possible). 

Then, include this app in your classroom routine. When assigning new work, ask students to open the app and log it right there and then - and stay consistent with this to help build the organizational skill. 

If premium is an option, you as their teacher can directly assign tasks and deadlines through the app, making it a central hub for your students outside of an LMS like Google Classroom.

This app’s free version should be enough for most - but at only $4.99 USD/year, the premium features are well worth it.

Regardless of the tool used, organizational apps like myHomework can help reduce the ‘forgetfulness’ of students and help build foundational skills for life.

BRAINY BITS

Homework - yay or nay? When and where?

Even though homework makes up such a large part of our education culture, there really isn’t much research out there on it, especially when it comes to best approaches for different subjects. 

The Study: Little and often

Authors took data on 4,118 8th grade students from the 2019 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) which has been occurring every 4 years since 1995.

The goal was to see what the best combination of homework frequency, duration, and time spent results in the highest rate of student success and lowest rate of stress.

To do so, they used a machine learning model called Bayesian Causal Forests. In normal speak, this is an algorithm that takes data and makes predictions based on a set of decision rules provided by the researchers.

Researchers took the recent TIMSS math and science data, and boiled down anything regarding homework into its basic ‘roots’ to compare.

The rules given to the algorithm by the researchers included:

The Results:

Increasing homework frequency to every day showed a significant increase in student success for math, increasing final grades by up to 7.5%. 

But for science, the key number is 3 times per week to lead to a grade increase of 5.31%.

No significant difference was seen when homework was longer than 15 minutes in either subject.

No clear trend was seen between socioeconomic groups. The parent/guardian level of education or even extra available resources at home showed no increased advantage when it came to homework results.

In Your Classroom:

Homework is a tricky thing for teachers. We don’t want to overwhelm students, but we also don’t want them to forget the skills they learnt during the day.

Studies like this show us that homework is best used in repetitive skill building subjects, like math, which require applying knowledge to a wide variety of problems. 

The biggest take away (in our opinion) that students will be happy about - longer homework assignments do not mean better results; 15 minutes per subject is the goal.

Strategies

For math, consistent practice is the absolute key - even if we’re talking about simple repetition of basic skills at an early grade.

5 times per week, as recommended by these results, may seem like a lot, but it is only 15 minutes per day. On days where there may be larger assignments and projects coming up, reduce this as needed. 

Also, don’t focus on assessing homework for grades - keep it simple. Assess together the following day as a class instead. This is a small time price to pay for up to a whole grade point higher in results.

For more complicated subjects that require deep dives - like science - spread out the frequency and still do your best to keep it to 15 minutes.

Regardless, homework still has its place in most classrooms. When framed as a way to build foundational skill sets in short bursts of time, it becomes a very powerful classroom tool that doesn’t always deserve it’s bad reputation.

REFERENCES

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

myHomework (2024). Get better grades. Retrieved from https://myhomeworkapp.com/

Brainy Bits:

McJames, N., Parnell, A., & O’Shea, A. (2024). Little and often: causal inference machine learning demonstrates the benefits of homework for improving achievement in mathematics and science. Learning and Instruction, 93.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101968