S5 E7 - What Does Research Say About Homework?

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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn and I'm recording here in Tasmania, on the lands of the Palawa people.

Today's episode comes from a question that was asked in our Facebook group, On the Structured Literacy Bus, so if you haven't joined us, come on over, we'd love to see you. It's a question that I think many of us grapple with.

It's the question of homework. Should we give it? If we do, what should it look like, and how do we make sure it actually helps our students?

What Does the Research Say?

The homework debate has been around for as long as I've been teaching and in fact even longer than that. Every school, every teacher and every parent seems to have their own take on whether it's worthwhile. And when we look at the research, well, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Some studies show it makes little difference to overall outcomes and, interestingly, some meta-analyses have even found that parent help can have a negative impact on student learning (Wang & Li, 2024; Fernández-Alonso, 2022). But before you run through the school declaring, "No more homework!", let's dig a little deeper into what some research tells us about when homework might actually be helpful.

And I have to be really clear, there is no definitive answer from research. So in the absence of that, we ask ourselves the question, What does the research say and how can we use common sense and experience to make great choices for students? So I have a couple of papers to share.

Our First Study

The first is called Supporting Young Children's Literacy Learning Through Homeschool Partnerships: The Effectiveness of a Home Repeated Reading Intervention by Alisa Hindin and Jeanne Paratore. This paper was published in the Journal of Literacy Research in 2007, and it's a small one with less than 10 students involved, so we do have to keep that in mind when interpreting the results.

The study focused on a home repeated-reading intervention, and we know from lots of research that repeated reading does support fluency, so that's in alignment with what we already know. What caught my attention was how specific and structured the approach was. The researchers found that when students practiced reading text at home, that they'd already worked on in class, and that's important, they made fewer errors and showed significant gains in fluency. Now, these weren't just random books that were sent home, as I said, they were texts the students had already encountered in classroom instruction. All of the children in the study read more than 10,000 words during the intervention. Further, four of the parents provided substantial word-level support, and the children who received this support made fewer repeated reading errors. So the best gains were made with a combination of repeated reading and word-level help.

Our Second Study

The second study by Dolean and Lervag is called Variations of homework amount assigned in elementary school can impact academic achievement. This study was published in the Journal of Experimental Education in 2022. The Dolean and Lervag study included 440 second-grade students, who were randomly distributed in three groups within the classes they attended. Each group received different amounts of homework in writing and maths for 20 days. The result showed a significant immediate effect of homework quantity on writing, as measured by tests of punctuation and spelling correction, but not on maths competency. The writing homework effects were sustained four months later, but only for the group that had allocated a moderate amount of homework to writing skills practice. This group spent approximately 20 minutes per day doing homework, with a balance of maths and literacy tasks, so all up, it was about 10 minutes a day of practicing punctuation, spelling and other core skills.

What's interesting about this study was the explicit connection between what was studied in class and the homework. Again, the homework wasn't random. It was focused on building foundational skills, including spelling and punctuation. In fact, the purpose of the homework assignments was to allow students to practice skills taught in class the same day. The researchers found that increasing the amount of homework to that 20 minutes a day had a significant immediate effect on both writing skills that were measured, so that was spelling and editing, but that increasing the amount of homework past a certain threshold did not increase academic performance.

The results suggest that providing opportunities for additional practice of writing rules that were introduced in the classroom could help students transfer these skills from short-term to long-term memory and support memory consolidation (Himmer et al., 2019). And doesn't that make sense? So the homework was useful when students practiced what they had been taught but was not yet fully consolidated in class because of the extra opportunity for consolidation.

Learning and Memory

Now let's connect this to what we know about how learning works in general. We'll think about the information processing model for a moment. We know that to move learning from working memory through to long-term memory, we need multiple repetitions and practice opportunities. Well-designed homework can provide those additional repetitions that cement learning. It's like building a pathway, the more times you walk it, the clearer and more established it becomes.

But, and this is a big but, we need to be really careful about how we structure this. Remember the explicit teaching model, well, I do, we do, you do, of course you do. When we're sending work home, we want to make sure it sits firmly in that independent practice zone. And this is because we don't want to put parents in the position of being an unqualified helper. And we've all had experience of a parent telling us well, I tried to help, but I think I just confused them more. And that happens particularly as the students get older. But it can happen at any age and that's not the parent's fault, they're not the trained teacher and they shouldn't have to be.

So, what now?

So what does all this mean for us as teachers and school leaders making decisions? Well, the research that we have here suggests that homework could be beneficial if it's directly connected to what was taught in class. The skills being practiced are already secure enough for independent work. So if something's only been introduced but the students couldn't tell you about it half an hour later, they're not ready for that to go home yet. The amount of homework assigned needs to be moderate, about 15 to 20 minutes seems to be the sweet spot. And remember, I'm saying "seems to be", we have no definitive answers on that. The last thing here is that there's a clear purpose focused on consolidating specific skills. So what things could we send home that fit this criteria we've seen outlined in the research? I'm going to share a couple of practical ideas, but I'm sure that you have others.

Some Practical Ideas

First up, phonics-related resources are a great option for getting those additional repetitions in that we know lead to long-lasting change. This is especially important for our students who struggle. If you're a Resource Room member, you already have access to a range of resources designed with parents in mind. Our complex code homework printables, for example, come with specific instructions for adults to help students practice these skills appropriately.

Reading materials are always a winner too, but, and this is important, make sure they're connected to what you're reading in the classroom. We also have to be mindful that it's not appropriate to send books home for Foundation students until they're actually blending with confidence. Remember, we don't want the parent in the position of being the reading teacher. For students practicing phonics, you can send simple passages or decodable text home and, again, Resource Room members have access to what we call assisted reading passages, which includes specific instructions for adults. For older students, you can send passages or material that you've been using for partner reading, whether that comes from other subject areas or from English, and I know I sound like a cracked record here, but Resource Room members also have access to reading passages for over 100 morpheme units that can be sent home after you've done the unit in class.

But let me be clear about what we don't want to see. We don't want to see a return to those one-size-fits-all Year Two or Year Four or Year Six homework sheet where every student gets the same questions regardless of where they're up to. That didn't make sense to me when I was a pre-service teacher and it absolutely doesn't make sense to me now. It is a nightmare for our struggling students and unless homework is specifically linked to what's happening in class, it's probably not that great for the other students either. It's random, busy work.

I think it's also really important to remember that homework shouldn't place undue pressure on parents. So the science dioramas and independent geography assignments where students are doing research on a country of their choice, are probably not the best idea. Remember what the research told us: putting parents into the role of the homework helper may actually lead to worse results for the students.

Finally, and this is crucial, consider your school's context when making decisions about homework. If your students come from families where home literacy levels are low, asking parents to help with reading, particularly for older students reading more complex passages, well, this might well alienate parents as they struggle to help passages. We want to build bridges with our families, not create barriers.

But on the other side, you may be working in a school where there's high parental expectation and high parental capacity to support, so every school's context will inform their approach to homework.

If you decide to include homework as part of the teaching toolkit, make sure it's purposeful, connected and achievable. Our goal isn't to create stress or confusion at home, but to provide meaningful opportunities for practice that supports and consolidates the work we're doing in the classroom.

That's it from me for this episode. I hope this has helped clarify some of the thinking around homework and given you some practical ways to approach it. Until next time, happy teaching everyone. Bye.

References

Dacian Dorin Dolean & Arne Lervag (2022) Variations of homework amount assigned in elementary school can impact academic achievement, The Journal of Experimental Education, 90:2, 280-296, DOI: 10.1080/00220973.2020.1861422

Fernández-Alonso, R., Álvarez-Díaz, M., García-Crespo, F. J., Woitschach, P., & Muñiz, J. (2022). Should we Help our Children with Homework? A Meta-Analysis Using PISA Data. Psicothema, 34(1), 56–65. https://doi.org/10.7334/psicothema2021.65

Hindin, A., & Paratore, J. R. (2007). Supporting Young Children’s Literacy Learning through Home-School Partnerships: The Effectiveness of a Home Repeated-Reading Intervention. Journal of Literacy Research, 39(3), 307-333. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862960701613102

Wang, Y., & Li, L. M. W. (2024). Relationships between parental involvement in homework and learning outcomes among elementary school students: The moderating role of societal collectivism-individualism. The British journal of educational psychology, 94(3), 881–896. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12692

Looking for resources and training to help with choosing your students' homework? Join us inside The Resource Room!