Best Practice

Beyond busywork: Meaningful homework that actually helps students learn

The homework teachers set must play a core role in helping students to learn – or to put it another way helping them not to forget. Dr Jovita M Castelino offers advice on how to get your homework tasks right
Home learning: Regular, well-thought out homework tasks can achieve three important things: Increase student confidence and ability to participate in class, increase student attainment, and build study habits - Adobe Stock

Picture this: your class is struggling with motivation but generally follow your instructions and complete the work. They practise lots of carefully sequenced questions when studying a topic in lessons and sit an assessment after a few weeks. Their scores are acceptable, and all is going well.

But a few months later, when you ask them questions on the previous topic, few can recall the key concepts. What went wrong?

Well, forgetting took place. But forgetting is natural and necessary for learning. Research suggests that forgetting is not about memory loss but about altered memory access (for more on the wealth of research into this topic you can see SecEd’s recent series of articles on retrieval practice and the recent SecEd podcast episodes on retrieval practice and also on memory).

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