How Does Homework Help Students In The Future

Why is there homework?

Have you ever wondered why in today’s education students are assigned homework from grade school through college? Maybe you’ve heard somewhere that homework began as a form of punishment or maybe you thought it was a just a way for instructors to make their students prove their knowledge. Does any of this sound familiar to you? I know I have been hearing different stories about the origins and purpose of homework since before I can remember. One time in high school, I even remember being that told homework was a legacy of cruel Prussian ideas which developed into the authoritarian Nazi education system— which is about as close as you can get to hearing someone call homework evil! So, how did homework get such a bad rap, and why is it still used today if everyone seems to hate it?!

What they don’t tell you

News flash, homework exists not to punish students, check on progress, or instill Nazi ideology, it exists to teach students how to study. This might sound silly, but have you even noticed how every time you move up an education level the first thing you learn is how wrong everything you knew before was? For example, when I first got to middle school, I learned that everything I knew about writing essays and take-home assignments was a lie; my essay was not a hamburger and homework was no longer there just to determine if I knew how to spell determine. It’s the job of a quiz or test to check up on how much students have been learning, not a homework assignment.

The fact is, homework is a building block for future study habits, a lot of secondary education is simply focused on teaching students how to learn, in other words how to teach themselves. I didn’t realize this when I was in high school, in fact, I recall completing homework in pink highlighter as it was being collected, showing no work and almost no effort. I figured this should be acceptable because I already knew the material and obviously could answer the questions. I was wrong, the homework was assigned to provide a framework for me to study with and by completing it in a class all I demonstrated was that I had no study habits at all.

How do you “learn” to Study

Do you see where I am going with this? Homework is part of nearly any curriculum because it forces students to sit down and set aside time to practice learning. The act of doing homework helps students learn how to self-asses, take useful notes, and most of all develop positive study habits. Not convinced? Try comparing the design of an assignment versus the design of homework and think about the purpose of each. An assignment is a specific task given to a student to demonstrate their ability, it is designed to challenge a student and replicate real-world use of their knowledge.

Homework, on the other hand, is a collection of smaller tasks, usually increasing in difficulty, designed to help the student improve their ability. Since the tasks begin small and get more and more difficult as they progress homework usually helps students identify which areas need improvement. Think about homework assignments listed at the end of a textbook chapter, this was very common for my high school calculus class. When you miss a problem you usually go back through the material and look up where you went wrong. By assigning homework regularly teachers ensure, especially with younger students, that everyone in the class is setting aside time to go through their book and study for themselves, test out what they do and don’t know, and then teach themselves the small pieces they are missing.

Homework Helps

So, if you want to develop good habits for future learning then take your homework seriously in the present. Again, you probably already know homework helps improves your reading comprehension and writing skills, but more importantly it will help you learn to teach yourself. As students progress into further education skills they learned from homework become more and more important.

Don’t believe me? Well, just think about the fact that as you move further along in your education you are expected to know more material but spend less time in class. This is because by the time you get to college students are expected to be able to teach themselves much of the material. And trust me, if you don’t have the study skills to assess your progress, fill in knowledge gaps, and learn on your own it will be much more difficult to succeed in higher education.