| > According to a 2021 Pew survey, 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent This could be addressed by making homework assignments that can be done without a computer. In academic subjects (math, science, English, history) it should be possible to assign homework that doesn't require anything other than the textbook or class handouts. As far as whether homework is useful or not I have no opinion when it comes to elementary school, middle school, or high school because I have almost no recollection of doing any homework. I'm sure I was assigned plenty of it, but all I remember was in advanced biology in high school we had a semester long homework assignment to collect and identify either 50 different local insect species and 10 different local plant species or 10 insects and 50 plants. In college though I'm pretty sure homework is useful. At my college (Caltech) you could pass most classes without doing homework if you did well enough on the final and midterm. First year was all pass/fail so if you went that route it wouldn't even effect your GPA. But I can't recall anyone who skipped homework and actually learned the material well. To really get it you needed to get the theory from class and/or the textbook and you needed to do problems that applied that. But homework at Caltech was quite a bit different than homework in high school which may have aided in its effectiveness. In high school when I worked on homework there were usually no other kids nearby working on the same homework. At Caltech there would be other people living in the same house I was in who had the same homework. And at Caltech most professors allowed or even encouraged students helping each other on homework, as long as you aren't just giving someone else the answers. For example when I took the intro to abstract algebra class the guy in the next room was also in it, and so was another guy just around the corner of our hall, and two more farther down that hall. Me and the guy from the next room and one of the others would typically work on it on his room, mostly working alone at first but coordinating so that we start on different problems. That way when we finished our problem we could move on to a problem someone else had already done so if we got stuck we could ask them for help. If none of us could see an approach someone would go ask the two guys around the corner. They would come ask us if they got stuck. All in all it worked out great and I learned a lot from these homework group sessions. I wonder if a similar experience could work before college at boarding schools? There you would have easy access to others who are working on the same homework. |