1. Student views about homework Toby Leonard Eleanor Scott Jessica Hollis Nima Habibzadeh Lauren Danbury Alice Ward

2. What are we doing and why? Our goal was to investigate what types of homework is being set across different subjects and how effective this homework is in improving the learning of students. We also wanted to look at the different attitudes to homework, looking at different areas of ability, to determine how students and teachers feel about the usefulness of homework tasks.

3. So what did we do? In our first meeting, we met Mary Kellett, from the Open University. We worked with her for a morning and had a session talking about observational skills and what is successful when designing a questionnaire. This was useful because it gave us a really good idea of what we were hoping to achieve. We spoke to her about what we should do in our project, how it would be effective and what would get the best results. Such as interviews, questionnaires and attitude surveys. We spoke to her about what we should do in our project, how it would be effective and what would get the best results. Such as interviews, questionnaires and attitude surveys.

4. Designing the questionnaire  We sat around a table with Mary, Mrs Weston and the group and discussed open and closed questions, different types of bias and also what answers we were looking for. From this, we then knew what type of questions to ask. We decided to use multiple choice type questions, inviting students to circle answers so it would be easier to analyse the data from these pre- set categories. We also asked them to write down the name of any specific subjects they get most and least homework in. We thought that this would give us the most accurate results.

5. Who we would ask?  We wanted to get a really strong sample of students, across the different key stages and abilities  We decided that we would ask 80 pupils to fill in the questionnaires for us, and then we would take a smaller sample of students to interview in more detail. We would ask the highest and lowest ability teaching sets in years 7,8,9 and 10, as we felt 11, 12 and 13 would be concentrating mainly on coursework.

6. Pilot survey  From here, we left Mary for a few weeks and worked on our own, finishing the questionnaire, designed a pilot survey and posted it to a tutor group to make sure it made sense and there were no ambiguities. From this pilot we made some alterations to improve the accessibility of it and ensure we got accurate results.

7. Questionnaires  When these changes were made, we photocopied the questionnaires in different colours indicating year group and wrote on the top of the sheet, the higher and lower ability teaching set within year groups. We went to the different classes and gave out questionnaires to ten students in each of these classes. All these questionnaires were given out and filled in anonymously to ensure confidentiality and to get a more honest result from the students. From there we began to analyse our findings.

8. Results  When we got the questionnaires back, we did a master sheet for all the individual year groups which gave us an idea of what year groups get the most homework and separated SATs from GCSEs and KS3 and KS4. We then did a master sheet for ability and this showed us whether students of a specific standard get more or less homework because of this. We did this by tallying each question to see how many people thought the same thing.

9. Graphing  From these results, we graphed them by ability and displayed these results side by side to compare the difference between higher and lower ability. Because we thought this would make more sense than age group. This way, you can measure it through ability across the school. We chose not to do it by age group because we decided it would have been obvious that year 7’s would get less homework than a year 10.

10. The Results

11. Results Q1: On average how much homework do you do on a weekday? Lower ability students spend less time on homework (64% spend 30 minutes or less per week day night where as 17% are doing between 1 and 3 hours a week day night). It is a different picture with the higher ability students as they spend more time on their homework (37% spend 30 or less per week day night where as 26% are spending between 1 and 3 hours a week day night). * All Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.

12. Q2: On average how much homework do you do in a whole week? 88% of the lower ability students spend less than 5 hours on homework in a week. 5% of students do between 7 and 14 hours of homework per week. Again with this information we see a different view with the higher ability, 55% do less than 5 hours on homework a week rather than 15% do between 7 and 14 hours of homework per week.

13. Q4: Which subject do you get the most homework in? Maths is clearly giving a higher number of homework than all subjects in both higher and lower ability as you can see from the graph. English despite being a core subject is perceived by the students in both ability groups as giving the least amount of homework out of all the subjects, moreover science, being another core subjects is relatively low compared to humanities that is getting higher amount of homework, bearing in mind we need the core subjects the most, to achieve future goals

14. Q6- In your opinion how relevant is your homework to what you are learning in lesson? On a 10 point scale 58% of lower ability students rate the relevance of their homework as 5 or less compared to high ability students. 42% of lower ability students rate the relevance of their homework as 6 or more compared to 65% of higher ability students

15. Q7: How far do you agree : I am given enough time to complete and hand in homework for the deadline. Lower ability students tended to be not sure as to whether they felt that they got enough time to complete homework. 32% of lower ability students felt that they had enough time, but the majority were unsure or felt they did not. 54% of Higher ability students tended to agreed that they had enough time to complete homework, with 29% feeling they did not get enough time

16. Q8: I understand every piece of homework I am given 36% of lower ability students do not understand some pieces of their homework With 32% unsure, which shows that 68% of lower ability students are not fully understanding their homework 32% of higher ability students do not understand some of their homework with 16% unsure Overall this shows that of all the students we surveyed only 39% feel that they regularly understand their homework

17. Q9: Will it help your learning if your homework is marked, with improvements and further targets? These graphs clearly speak for themselves, students of all abilities want homework marked with improvements and targets. 58% of students felt that this would help their learning.

18. Q10: How valuable is homework to you? 53% of lower ability students feel that homework is of little value, with only 23% feeling it was of value. Its interesting that 23% were unsure of its value. 54% of higher ability students feel that homework is of little value, with 21% feeling it was of value. 24% were unsure.

19. Q11: Do you use your homework diary? Overall it seems that students are using their homework diaries with 48% of lower ability using theirs and 74% of higher using theirs. This is a massive difference between the abilities and appears to be something that needs addressing. When asked how useful they felt the diaries were, the lower ability students tended to lean towards not useful, with higher ability really varied. When you take this into account of students understanding of homework, it is interesting to note that those who do not understand their homework tend to be those students who are not using their planners, or finding them useful. This could be that they are not using them properly, and so not understanding, or that lower ability students are not understanding before they put their homework in, and therefore not understanding it when they get home.

20. Main Conclusions The main conclusions that we have drawn are:  Lower ability students tend to spend less time on their homework, but feel that they need more time to complete it.  Lower ability students feel that they do not understand their homework, and this seems to link with why they don’t tend to find all homework useful or valuable, or want to spend time on it.  It was surprising to see that most higher ability students do their homework at school, how can lower ability students be encouraged to do this also?  The maths department seems be to giving out the most homework, but other core subjects are not giving enough. This is interesting when looking at GCSE results, as Maths are making great improvements.  There is a clear divide between how students feel towards homework and their ability, except when looking at how all students feel about the validity of homework. It would seem that students of all abilities need to be more engaged with homework, to feel that it is relevant and useful to them.  It would also seem evident that the school is providing facilities for students to complete homework at school, but lower ability are not using them, would it be more beneficial to have these sessions staffed within departments to help lower ability students with their understanding?

21. Areas for discussion  How can lower ability students be more engaged in homework?  How can departments link homework to lessons to ensure that it is relevant?  Are higher ability students spending too much time on or given too much homework? Are lower ability students given enough?  How can the diary be improved to ensure all students feel it is a valuable resource that can help them?  What is in place to help students who do not understand their homework? How might this be improved?

22. Thank you We have looked at all the data we could, and we could have continued to analyse it in many different ways. It is important to note that all students are not going to be eager about all aspects of homework, but as a school we need to continue to try and portray that homework is a valuable and crucial tool for learning. Thank you