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The Benefits Of Homework

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Cooper defines homework as "task assigned to students by school teachers that are meant to be carried out during non-school hour."(Cooper 2015) However, is it effective enough to justify its extension of the six hours of school students experience each weekday? As Bennett explains in “Must Won’t Do It!”, “Much attention is placed on helping students develop as complex and creative thinkers, yet many classrooms continue to use learning structures without examining their effectiveness. This is often the case with homework. Research findings on the effectiveness of homework are mixed, and few studies have examined students’ and educators’ perspectives on the benefits of homework as a learning structure” (Bennet). Our current structure of homework may be achieving the opposite of what it needs to do.
More than any other aspect of education, homework has been the cause of more friction between schools and home and becomes the prime battlefield when schools, families, and communities view one another as adversaries. Recent homework debates in this country have centered on questions of how much homework at which grades produce what kinds of learning gains. A recent analysis of homework research by the Center for Public Education (2007) found that homework at the elementary level is counterproductive, while homework in middle and high school shows some correlation with small increases in test scores. But those findings do not hold across the board. Homework may have

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