HOMEWORK REVIEW

As part of a comprehensive and balanced curriculum at Holy Cross Catholic Primary School, homework has been seen as one way of supporting and fostering life-long learning and connecting families with the learning of their children. The setting of homework needs to take into consideration the need for students to have a balanced lifestyle. This includes sufficient time for family, sport, recreational and cultural pursuits. Generally, homework provides students with opportunities to practise skills, review content and deepen understanding of concepts learned at school. Homework and practice can also help students to develop self-regulation processes such as time management and study skills.

As part of this year’s Meet and Greet sessions, we have asked parents to complete a “Getting to Know your Child” form, which also included the opportunity to comment on Homework. We will collate your feedback in the coming weeks. Along with teacher feedback, and some student feedback, this will inform an update of our school’s Homework Policy and practices.  

Research around homework is varied and not particularly conclusive, providing us with a range of views and evidence about its impact and effectiveness. For example 

Homework or “home  learning” 

• can serve as a valuable tool for skill development and reinforcement for some children
• can have more positive effects for certain groups of students. Some studies have shown that older students gain more academic benefits than do younger students, perhaps due to their less effective study habits and greater distractibility 9 (Cooper, 1989; Hoover-Dempsey et al. 2001; Leone and Richards 1989) 
• can have “non-academic” benefits, for example, learning responsibility, managing time, growing study habits, and perseverance to finish a task (Cooper, Robinson and Patall 2006; Corno and Xu 2004)
• that, if it is too much, may lesson its effectiveness. Research on the amount of time recommended is limited, but primary students appear to benefit from smaller amounts (less than 1 hour a night)

An Australian case study of young children’s experiences of homework (Farrell & Danby, 2015) found that participating children were very proactive with their homework and their parents had little to no involvement in that process. The children viewed homework as a part of their daily routine, which is suggestive of the roles of parents and teachers in facilitating the children’s perceptions of homework.

John Hattie’s (2009) synthesis of five meta-analyses on primary and secondary homework (161 global studies) are detailed within the Australasian Research Summary for secondary homework. Sixty-five percent of studies found positive effects, while 35 percent had no effect. Overall, the effect size for homework across primary and secondary was 0.29 but not significant. (Souce: Evidence for Learning- Homework: A summary of the research evidence on homework in the Australasian context)