Why do some students work hard on their homework, while others do not? Results of a survey of students attending middle schools and high schools in Germany suggest that students’ general level of conscientiousness predicts how much effort goes into their homework.

Students’ beliefs about how well they can do the homework assignment and the intrinsic value in it, as well as their general interest in the subject, also predict homework behavior.

The findings are based on responses to questionnaires on math homework and class work posed to 3,283 mostly Caucasian students from diverse educational and social backgrounds in grades five, seven, eight and nine in 11 urban schools in Germany.

Homework is often a battlefield for students, parents, teachers and administrators. The current findings suggest that parents and teachers could help students boost the effort they put into homework by improving students’ beliefs that they can do well, increasing their interest in the subject and providing a sense that the assignments are useful, researchers say.

“For many of the older students, it may be less a question of whether they are able to do the homework than of whether there is any point in doing it,” note Dr. Ulrich Trautwein of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and colleagues in the current issue of Child Development.

Age also emerged as a key factor in attention to homework, with students in lower grades showing greater effort and motivation than those in higher grades. “Homework effort was highest in grade five and lowest in grade nine,” Trautwein and colleagues report. It’s possible, they suggest, that studiousness in the upper grades may conflict with boys and girls gender identities in adolescence.

Time spent on homework was unrelated to homework effort and motivation. Thus, “homework time should not be used as a measure of students’ investment in school,” Trautwein and colleagues contend. “Interestingly,” they say, there was a significant increase in homework time between grades 5 and 7 but not between grades 7 and 9.

In general, the students seemed to have more interest and motivation for classwork than for homework. However, while highly conscientious students reported giving homework and classroom work an equal amount of attention, less conscientious students reported putting less effort into their homework than into their classwork.

Parents confirmed that their children spend a substantial amount of time working on homework in core subjects. According to students’ reports, homework is one of the most “aversive elements” of school, Trautwein and colleagues note in their report.

The jury is still out on whether students’ who are assigned a lot of homework outperform their peers who get less homework, they also note.

SOURCE: Child Development, July/August 2006.