Quality Homework

I think that every student in middle, high school, or college would completely agree with anything mentioned in this article. For the longest time growing up, I would complain about how pointless my homework assignments were, and finally an article in The New York Times brings up points on how students' after school assignments have little to no impact on test scores and are very poorly written and is basically just busy work. Through experience throughout middle and high school, I agree with those points because most of my homework I received never really helped me actually learn the material, but was just busy work and a continuation from what I learned in class. Also, the new Mind, Brain, Education methods now seem to be the new and improved way of designing or doing homework for students. The "space repetition" is a method that allows students to spread out there learning material over a longer period of time. I personally think this would somewhat work, but I like learning one subject at a time and then moving onto the next subject after completeling the first. I feel like I can relate to the article and understand where there coming from with spacing out the material, but I think it also depends on what type of learning is easiest for the student. The second method or technique is the "retrieval practice" which is testing students not on what they know but reinfocing it. The article is trying to tell readers that every time we think of a memory, we make it stronger. It suggests that writing notes and outlines is not effective on students, which is actually a big portion of homework in this century. The last type of method is "interleaving." This method is stating that students can learn not by grouping different types of problems, but mixing them up so they have to think about each question more thoroughly allowing them to use their brains more. I agree with this suggestion because I think that when students are taught each type of problem in a grouped form, they will not be ready for the test when the questions are mixed up. Any student can agree that homework that is just busy work is a pain and a waste of time. I think if teachers start using these different methods, there students will actually get something out of their homework assignments and perform better in regular schoolwork.