Research shows that there is a positive correlation between completing homework and students’ achievement (grades), but no correlation between completing homework and performance on tests that measure skills.24 Even though teachers hold students accountable for homework by reducing their grades when they don’t complete it, the extra time spent working at home does not build skills for those students completing homework.
And we know that students with fewer resources have more difficulty completing homework, making it an unnecessary element of schooling that drives persistent underachievement by students living in poverty. 25
While the research is convincing that homework does not improve academic performance and that it does drive inequities in student achievement, teachers continue to spend an enormous amount of time and energy planning and supervising students’ homework. It is hard enough for parents to supervise their children’s homework when they are living in the same house. It turns out to be an impossible task for teachers to do from school.
When teachers look at the work that students complete at home, they find with frustration that the work is often:
- lower quality than the work students produce in the classroom
- incomplete
- done incorrectly
- missing
Not surprisingly, teachers report that looking at student work is one of the most unpleasant parts of teaching. Homework that consists of independent reading is particularly difficult to assess the next day in school. Most teachers use comprehension quizzes, which are necessarily inaccurate. The quizzes only show whether students have understood the text in the way the teacher hopes, not whether or not students spent time trying to read the text.
While homework is difficult to assess fairly and usefully, it is even harder to assess how a teacher uses homework. Observational protocols that administrators use to assess classroom teaching often include contradictory guidance about homework, asking the administrator to notice whether the teacher:
- incorporates the homework into the classwork so that it is meaningful.
- has a way for students who don’t complete homework to participate meaningfully in classwork. (Increasing attention to issues of equity requires that teachers not leave students out during class just because their homes are not conducive to focused academic work.)
An administrator trying to focus teachers on equity will often emphasize including students in class at all costs, further frustrating a teacher who has worked so hard to create meaningful homework and hold students accountable.
As many arguments as there are for not making homework an essential part of instruction, there are even more compelling reasons to assign students to do the most critical work during class when the teacher can support and further challenge all students.
Other approaches are not conducive to this individual supervision of classwork. But Riveting Results’ activities create habits and routines in the classroom that make it both possible and satisfying for teachers to work individually with each student. And by working individually with each student, the teacher can appreciate each student’s unique perspective, further motivating all students to produce authentic work that represents their best effort. Teachers find looking at work produced under these conditions to be satisfying—and even fun. It is easy to spot and react to students’ insights, and also easy to spot students who require some redirection. Students’ motivation builds as they produce authentic work that is recognized by their teacher. Together, these students and their teacher create an irresistibly engaging classroom community.
Counterintuitively, supervising students’ essential reading and writing also allows for teachers to push students to be more independent. The supports that a teacher uses in Riveting Results’ activities are modular and once students show mastery with support, the teacher can systematically withdraw that support until students produce their work independently.
Students who are proficient readers and writers, and who enjoy reading and writing, are then ready to take the next step to organize their lives outside of the classroom in order to do productive work in their own spaces.
24. Harris Cooper, Jorgianne Civey Robinson, Erika A. Patall, “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987–2003,” Review of Educational Research 76, no. 1, Spring 2006: 1–62.
25. Etta Kravolac and John Buell, “End Homework Now,” Educational Leadership 58, no. 7, Apr 2001: 39-42. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ626293.
