How Students' Homework Effort Impacts Their Learning Success: Insights from Digital Learning Tools

What is it about?

In many countries, homework assignments and individual practice are integral to schooling, with students all over the world spending millions of hours on homework daily. However, research on the effects of homework on learning success has been complex: putting effort into homework leads to learning success, whereas spending too much time on homework does not. The origins of these findings remained unclear as the field has not yet adequately or accurately measured students’ behavior while they are doing their homework. In past research, homework behavior has often been measured through students' self-reports, which can be unreliable (who remembers exactly how long they spent on certain exercises or how many mistakes they made anyway?). A somewhat newer method of measuring homework behavior is using logfile data that are produced when students do homework using a digital learning platform. Researchers have argued that so-called “behavioral trace data” are less biased and more objective than students’ self-reports. However, researchers have primarily used these data to conduct data-driven analyses of general behavior patterns and not theory-informed analyses that can not only summarize behavioral trends and surface patterns but also explain these by educational theory. This also contributed to inconclusive findings regarding the effect of homework behavior on learning success. We studied students' homework behavior, like effort and time spent, to see how they related to their learning success. Instead of relying on students' self-reports, we used behavioral trace data from a digital learning environment to see what students were actually doing during their homework. Informed by theory, we not only analyzed the link between behavioral trace data and learning success, but we also examined which homework behaviors were most strongly associated with learning. Based on data from 507 German seventh-grade learners of English as a foreign language, we found that putting in effort during homework is linked to better learning success, but simply spending more time isn’t necessarily helpful.

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Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Homework is a big part of school life, with students spending countless hours on it. While prior research identified homework to be effective as long as students put effort into it, the exact homework processes that actually help students succeed remained unclear. This study provides new insights by showing that how students work on their homework matters more than just how long they work. It also highlights the value of using digital learning environments and the behavioral trace data they produce to better understand and improve learning habits.

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