“The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade…Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.”
Annie Murphy Paul, 2011, from the New York Times
What does it mean, to make homework “smarter”? To me, a good homework assignment is integrative. It asks students to make connections between the things they’re learning about, and draws on the skills they’ve acquired previously. A good homework assignment should allow students to put what they’ve learned to use, in an interesting way. And if they can enjoy themselves while they’re doing that, well so much the better.
This doesn’t seem to be the way science is usually taught now, and it probably wasn’t when I was a student either. My stepdaughter is currently learning all about ionic and covalent bonding in her 9th grade biology class. She memorizes the definitions and the diagrams, and does well on the tests, but she doesn’t actually then use this memorized information in any useful or interesting way. The homework just reinforces the memorization.
Homeschoolers don’t really have “homework” in the sense that traditional schools use the term, since they’re always at home! But they face the same issues: workbook exercises–online or on paper–that mostly just ask students to write down what they’ve memorized. What are two characteristics of all amino acids? What do we call a molecule that contains two amino acids? Fill in the blanks and you’re done.
Studies have shown that most students forget something like 80% of all the facts that they memorize in any given course within about a month (a lot less than that, for me!), so what is the point of all that memorization if it’s not related to something interesting or important? “Sometime in the next 10-15 years, this information might come in handy!” Is that what we’re saying?
Homework should take what students have learned and reinforce it, and then give them the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned right away, to something interesting: a current problem in the news, for example, or some aspect of their own physiology, or something going on in nature. And in the process of doing so, I think it should encourage students to use other skills they’re learning as well, such as writing and math. As I have talked about earlier in this blog (“Scientists Write…and They Do Math, too!”), writing and math are important components of learning and doing science, and combining them together in giving assignments helps reinforce learning for all of those skills, in part by showing their relevance.
Many of the students that I have worked with in college have great trouble making connections between anything that they’ve covered in one course and anything that they’re learning in my course. They know a lot of stuff, but it’s all in separate little compartments, because the teaching they have experienced is itself so compartmentalized.
So in my courses, and in SciSpark activities, I try to encourage students to make connections for themselves. If we’ve been talking about the biomechanics of caterpillar locomotion, for example, I might ask them to write a poem about that for homework. It seems like a crazy idea, but it works. And it works, I think, because the activity encourages students to put the things they’ve learned together for themselves in an interesting way. Maybe in a future posting I’ll show you some of the poems I’ve gotten over the years. Few (probably none!) would win any prizes for poetry, but I’ll bet those students could talk with you about caterpillar locomotion years after the course is over!
As I’m very fond of saying, the only things we ever really learn are the things we teach ourselves. And if done properly, asking students to write in an interesting way can put students in exactly that position. And sometimes while you’re writing, you realize that you don’t understand quite as much as you thought you did. So you end up with a question to explore further, and what you learn is something that you remember, because you’ve taught it to yourself.
That’s the difference between learning, and memorizing.
Good assignments can also help to develop the ability to summarize information. As I say in my book, if you can’t summarize one piece of writing in your own words, you can’t possibly synthesize or compare several pieces of writing. “The ability to summarize is an underappreciated, largely neglected, but essential skill for professional life.”* I’ll blog more about those sorts of assignments another time.
*Pechenik, J.A. 2010. A Short Guide to Writing About Biology, 7th ed. Pearson Longman, NY.
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