Adolescents' Homework Performance in Mathematics and Science: Personal Factors and Teaching Practices

Classical educational research provides empirical evidence of the positive effect of doing homework on academic results. Nonetheless, when this effect is analyzed in detail there are inconsistent, and in some cases, contradictory results. The central aim of this study was to systematically investigate the effect of homework on performance of students in mathematics and science using multilevel models. The original sample consisted of 7,725 Spanish adolescents with a mean age of 13.78 (±0.82) of which 7,451 were evaluated after purging the sample of the students who did little to no homework. A 2-level hierarchical-linear analysis was performed, student and class, with 4 individual adjustment variables: gender, socioeconomic and cultural level, year repetition, and school grades, which were used to reflect previous student achievement. The individual level examined time spent, effort made, and the way homework was done. The class level considered frequency of assignment and quantity of homework. Prior knowledge, estimated using school grades, is shown to be the most important predictor of achievement in the study. Its effect is greater than the combined effect of all the other variables studied. Once background factors are controlled, the homework variables with most impact on the test are student autonomy and frequency of homework assignment by teachers. Autonomy when doing homework was shown to be the most important individual-level variable in both mathematics and science, and not effort and or time spent doing homework. The optimum duration of homework was found to be 1 hr a day.