Day 2 (7/29)

Wednesday 7/29/2016


After browsing through the Educational Psychology: Foundation for Teaching websites I found some interesting articles throughout the website as well as some issues. I found that almost half of the websites provided on the website lead to down websites with DNS issues that inhibited me from examining them throughout the day. This sadly seemed to be an issue continuing on throughout the websites leading to dead links and dead ends.

Continuing on with my WebQuest I went on a search to find a research study I could relate to I found a research conducted last year that focused on the amount of homework we are giving students today and how much we should be giving them. This study, which took place in 2015, broke down the pros and cons of homework by grade level and effectiveness throughout the years a student will stay in school.

The study I reviewed was a correlations study because it used grades between classes with longer and shorter work loads and the effect it had on the students grades and levels.

After the study concluded it ended up showing that giving an amount of homework that worked in an effective manner increased with age. This means that as a student gets older they are able to handle bigger work loads with homework that would end up being beneficial to the student. This may sound obvious but it's not because of the reasons we normally would assume. The reasons that an older student is able to take on bigger amounts of homework as they age pertains to the fact that in their younger years students need to focus more on how to learn then the just the course material. This means that younger students have more of a focus on the ability to study as well as the ability to obtain the information which is something I can relate to as a student because before college I felt like I didn't have the tools to be able to learn the material on my own and know exactly what would be the best method of doing so.

This study honestly just confirms what I wanted to take into my future classrooms with the ideas of not focusing too much on homework and using it as a crutch to fill in where I don't do enough teaching. I've come to get this view because of how many teachers I have had that use homework as busy work instead of actual content and valuable information.

Source: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/research-trends-is-homework-effective-youki-terada