why homework doesn't make you smarter

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Why homework doesn't seem to boost learning--and how it could.

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Some schools are eliminating homework, citing research showing it doesn’t do much to boost achievement. But maybe teachers just need to assign a different kind of homework.

In 2016, a second-grade teacher in Texas delighted her students—and at least some of their parents—by announcing she would no longer assign homework. “Research has been unable to prove that homework improves student performance,” she explained.

The following year, the superintendent of a Florida school district serving 42,000 students eliminated homework for all elementary students and replaced it with twenty minutes of nightly reading, saying she was basing her decision on “solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students.”

Many other elementary schools seem to have quietly adopted similar policies. Critics have objected that even if homework doesn’t increase grades or test scores, it has other benefits, like fostering good study habits and providing parents with a window into what kids are doing in school.

Those arguments have merit, but why doesn’t homework boost academic achievement? The research cited by educators just doesn’t seem to make sense. If a child wants to learn to play the violin, it’s obvious she needs to practice at home between lessons (at least, it’s obvious to an adult). And psychologists have identified a range of strategies that help students learn, many of which seem ideally suited for homework assignments.

For example, there’s something called “ retrieval practice ,” which means trying to recall information you’ve already learned. The optimal time to engage in retrieval practice is not immediately after you’ve acquired information but after you’ve forgotten it a bit—like, perhaps, after school. A homework assignment could require students to answer questions about what was covered in class that day without consulting their notes. Research has found that retrieval practice and similar learning strategies are far more powerful than simply rereading or reviewing material.

One possible explanation for the general lack of a boost from homework is that few teachers know about this research. And most have gotten little training in how and why to assign homework. These are things that schools of education and teacher-prep programs typically don’t teach . So it’s quite possible that much of the homework teachers assign just isn’t particularly effective for many students.

Even if teachers do manage to assign effective homework, it may not show up on the measures of achievement used by researchers—for example, standardized reading test scores. Those tests are designed to measure general reading comprehension skills, not to assess how much students have learned in specific classes. Good homework assignments might have helped a student learn a lot about, say, Ancient Egypt. But if the reading passages on a test cover topics like life in the Arctic or the habits of the dormouse, that student’s test score may well not reflect what she’s learned.

The research relied on by those who oppose homework has actually found it has a modest positive effect at the middle and high school levels—just not in elementary school. But for the most part, the studies haven’t looked at whether it matters what kind of homework is assigned or whether there are different effects for different demographic student groups. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.

A study that looked specifically at math homework , for example, found it boosted achievement more in elementary school than in middle school—just the opposite of the findings on homework in general. And while one study found that parental help with homework generally doesn’t boost students’ achievement—and can even have a negative effect— another concluded that economically disadvantaged students whose parents help with homework improve their performance significantly.

That seems to run counter to another frequent objection to homework, which is that it privileges kids who are already advantaged. Well-educated parents are better able to provide help, the argument goes, and it’s easier for affluent parents to provide a quiet space for kids to work in—along with a computer and internet access . While those things may be true, not assigning homework—or assigning ineffective homework—can end up privileging advantaged students even more.

Students from less educated families are most in need of the boost that effective homework can provide, because they’re less likely to acquire academic knowledge and vocabulary at home. And homework can provide a way for lower-income parents—who often don’t have time to volunteer in class or participate in parents’ organizations—to forge connections to their children’s schools. Rather than giving up on homework because of social inequities, schools could help parents support homework in ways that don’t depend on their own knowledge—for example, by recruiting others to help, as some low-income demographic groups have been able to do . Schools could also provide quiet study areas at the end of the day, and teachers could assign homework that doesn’t rely on technology.

Another argument against homework is that it causes students to feel overburdened and stressed.  While that may be true at schools serving affluent populations, students at low-performing ones often don’t get much homework at all—even in high school. One study found that lower-income ninth-graders “consistently described receiving minimal homework—perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night.” And if they didn’t complete assignments, there were few consequences. I discovered this myself when trying to tutor students in writing at a high-poverty high school. After I expressed surprise that none of the kids I was working with had completed a brief writing assignment, a teacher told me, “Oh yeah—I should have told you. Our students don’t really do homework.”

If and when disadvantaged students get to college, their relative lack of study skills and good homework habits can present a serious handicap. After noticing that black and Hispanic students were failing her course in disproportionate numbers, a professor at the University of North Carolina decided to make some changes , including giving homework assignments that required students to quiz themselves without consulting their notes. Performance improved across the board, but especially for students of color and the disadvantaged. The gap between black and white students was cut in half, and the gaps between Hispanic and white students—along with that between first-generation college students and others—closed completely.

There’s no reason this kind of support should wait until students get to college. To be most effective—both in terms of instilling good study habits and building students’ knowledge—homework assignments that boost learning should start in elementary school.

Some argue that young children just need time to chill after a long day at school. But the “ten-minute rule”—recommended by homework researchers—would have first graders doing ten minutes of homework, second graders twenty minutes, and so on. That leaves plenty of time for chilling, and even brief assignments could have a significant impact if they were well-designed.

But a fundamental problem with homework at the elementary level has to do with the curriculum, which—partly because of standardized testing— has narrowed to reading and math. Social studies and science have been marginalized or eliminated, especially in schools where test scores are low. Students spend hours every week practicing supposed reading comprehension skills like “making inferences” or identifying “author’s purpose”—the kinds of skills that the tests try to measure—with little or no attention paid to content.

But as research has established, the most important component in reading comprehension is knowledge of the topic you’re reading about. Classroom time—or homework time—spent on illusory comprehension “skills” would be far better spent building knowledge of the very subjects schools have eliminated. Even if teachers try to take advantage of retrieval practice—say, by asking students to recall what they’ve learned that day about “making comparisons” or “sequence of events”—it won’t have much impact.

If we want to harness the potential power of homework—particularly for disadvantaged students—we’ll need to educate teachers about what kind of assignments actually work. But first, we’ll need to start teaching kids something substantive about the world, beginning as early as possible.

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Kids are onto something: Homework might actually be bad

By Stan Horaczek

Posted on Sep 23, 2021 8:00 AM EDT

6 minute read

When you’re a kid, your stance on homework is generally pretty simple: It’s the worst. When it comes to educators, parents, and school administrators, however, the topic gets a lot more complicated. 

Collective educational enthusiasm toward homework has ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century in the US. School districts began abolishing homework in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only for it to come roaring back as the space race kicked off in the late ‘50s and drove a desire for sharper math and science skills. It fell out of fashion again during the Vietnam War era before it came back strong in the ‘80s .

As the country mostly transitions back to full-time, in-person schooling, the available research on homework and its efficacy is still messy at best. 

How much homework are kids doing?

There’s a fundamental issue at the very start of this discussion: we’re not entirely sure how much homework kids are actually doing. A 2019 Pew survey found that teens were spending considerably more time doing schoolwork at home than they had in the past—an hour a day, on average, compared to 44 minutes a decade ago and just 30 in the mid-1990s. 

But other data disagrees , instead suggesting that homework expansion primarily affects children in lower grades. But it’s worth noting that such arguments typically refer to data from more than a decade ago. 

How much homework are kids supposed to be doing?

Many schools subscribe to a “rule of thumb” that suggests students should get 10 minutes of homework for each grade level. So, first graders should get just 10 minutes of work to do at home while high schoolers should be cracking the books for up to two hours each night. 

This once served as the official guidance for educators from the National Education Association, as well as the National PTA. It also serves as the official homework policy for many school districts, even though the NEA’s outline of  the policy now leads to an error page . The National PTA also now relies on a less-specific resolution on homework which encourages districts and educators to focus on “quality over quantity.”

The PTA’s resolution effectively sums up the current dominant perspective on homework. “The National PTA and its constituent associations advocate that teachers, schools, and districts follow evidence-based guidelines regarding the use of homework assignments and its impact on children’s lives and family interactions.”

Even with these well-known standards, a study from researchers at Brown University, Brandeis University, Rhode Island College, Dean College, the Children’s National Medical Center, and the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology, found that younger children were still getting more than the recommended amount of homework by two or three times . First and second graders were doing roughly 30 minutes of homework every night. 

Does homework make kids smarter?

In the mid-2000s, a Duke researcher named Harris Cooper led up one of the most comprehensive looks at homework efficacy to-date. The research set out to explore the perceived correlation between homework and achievement. The results showed a general correlation between homework and achievement. Cooper reported, “No strong evidence was found for an association between the homework–achievement link and the outcome measure (grades as opposed to standardized tests) or the subject matter (reading as opposed to math).” 

The paper does suggest that the correlation strengthens after 7th grade—but it’s likely not a causal relationship. In an interview with the NEA , Cooper explains, “It’s also worth noting that these correlations with older students are likely caused, not only by homework helping achievement but also by kids who have higher achievement levels doing more homework.”

A 2012 study looked at more than 18,000 10th-grade students and concluded that increasing homework loads could be the result of too much material with insufficient instructional time in the classroom. “The overflow typically results in more homework assignments,” the lead researcher said in a statement from the University. “However, students spending more time on something that is not easy to understand or needs to be explained by a teacher does not help these students learn and, in fact, may confuse them.”

Even in that case, however, the research provided somewhat conflicting results that are hard to reconcile. While the study found a positive association between time spent on homework and scores on standardized tests, students who did homework didn’t generally get better grades than kids who didn’t. 

Can homework hurt kids?

It seems antithetical, but some research suggests that homework can actually hinder achievement and, in some cases, students’ overall health. 

A 2013 study looked at a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper middle class communities. The results showed that “students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives.” And that’s in affluent districts. 

When you add economic inequity into the equation, homework’s prognosis looks even worse. Research suggests that increased homework can help widen the achievement gap between low-income and economically advantaged students ; the latter group is more likely to have a safe and appropriate place to do schoolwork at night, as well as to have caregivers with the time and academic experience to encourage them to get it done. 

That doesn’t mean financially privileged kids are guaranteed to benefit from hours of worksheets and essays. Literature supporting homework often suggests that it gives parents an opportunity to participate in the educational process as well as monitor a child’s progress and learning. Opponents, however, contest that parental involvement can actually hurt achievement. A 2014 research survey showed that help from parents who have forgotten the material (or who never really understood it) can actually harm a student’s ability to learn. 

The digital homework divide

Access to reliable high-speed internet also presents an unfortunate opportunity for inequity when it comes to at-home learning. Even with COVID-era initiatives expanding programs to provide broadband to underserved areas, millions of households still lack access to fast, reliable internet . 

As more homework assignments migrate to online environments instead of paper, those students without reliable home internet have to make other arrangements to complete their assignments in school or somewhere else outside the home. 

How do we make homework work?

Some experts suggest decoupling homework from students’ overall grades. A 2009 paper suggests that, while homework can be an effective tool for monitoring progress, assigning a grade can actually undercut the main purpose of the work by encouraging students to focus on their scores instead of mastering the material. The study recommends nuanced feedback instead of numbered grades to keep the emphasis on learning—which has the added benefit of minimizing consequences for kids with tougher at-home circumstances. 

Making homework more useful for kids may also come down to picking the right types of assignments. There’s a well-worn concept in psychology known as the spacing effect , which suggests it’s easier to learn material revisited several times in short bursts rather than during long study sessions. This supports the idea that shorter assignments can be more beneficial than heavy workloads.  Many homework opponents add that at-home assignments should appeal to a child’s innate curiosity. It’s easy to find anecdotal evidence from educators who have stopped assigning homework only to find that their students end up participating in more self-guided learning. As kids head back into physical school buildings, the homework debate will no doubt continue on. Hopefully, the research will go with it.

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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Re-reading is inefficient. Here are 8 tips for studying smarter.

by Joseph Stromberg

The way most students study makes no sense.

That’s the conclusion of Washington University in St. Louis psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel — who’ve spent a combined 80 years studying learning and memory, and recently distilled their findings with novelist Peter Brown in the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning .

using active learning strategies is most effective

The majority of students study by re-reading notes and textbooks — but the psychologists’ research, both in lab experiments and of actual students in classes, shows this is a terrible way to learn material. Using active learning strategies — like flashcards, diagramming, and quizzing yourself — is much more effective, as is spacing out studying over time and mixing different topics together.

McDaniel spoke with me about the eight key tips he’d share with students and teachers from his body of research.

1) Don’t just re-read your notes and readings

Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

”We know from surveys that a majority of students, when they study, they typically re-read assignments and notes. Most students say this is their number one go-to strategy.

when students re-read a textbook chapter, they show no improvement in learning

”We know, however, from a lot of research, that this kind of repetitive recycling of information is not an especially good way to learn or create more permanent memories. Our studies of Washington University students, for instance, show that when they re-read a textbook chapter, they have absolutely no improvement in learning over those who just read it once.

“On your first reading of something, you extract a lot of understanding. But when you do the second reading, you read with a sense of ‘I know this, I know this.’ So basically, you’re not processing it deeply, or picking more out of it. Often, the re-reading is cursory — and it’s insidious, because this gives you the illusion that you know the material very well, when in fact there are gaps.”

2) Ask yourself lots of questions

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images

”One good technique to use instead is to read once, then quiz yourself, either using questions at the back of a textbook chapter, or making up your own questions. Retrieving that information is what actually produces more robust learning and memory.

retrieving information is what produces more robust learning and memory

”And even when you can’t retrieve it — when you get the questions wrong — it gives you an accurate diagnostic on what you don’t know, and this tells you what you should go back and study. This helps guide your studying more effectively.

”Asking questions also helps you understand more deeply. Say you’re learning about world history, and how ancient Rome and Greece were trading partners. Stop and ask yourself why they became trading partners. Why did they become shipbuilders, and learn to navigate the seas? It doesn’t always have to be why — you can ask how, or what.

“In asking these questions, you’re trying to explain, and in doing this, you create a better understanding, which leads to better memory and learning. So instead of just reading and skimming, stop and ask yourself things to make yourself understand the material.”

3) Connect new information to something you already know

”Another strategy is, during a second reading, to try relating the principles in the text to something you already know about. Relate new information to prior information for better learning.

”One example is if you were learning about how the neuron transmits electricity. One of the things we know if that if you have a fatty sheath surround the neuron, called a myelin sheath , it helps the neuron transmit electricity more quickly.

“So you could liken this, say, to water running through a hose. The water runs quickly through it, but if you puncture the hose, it’s going to leak, and you won’t get the same flow. And that’s essentially what happens when we age — the myelin sheaths break down, and transmissions become slower.”

( Quasar/Wikimedia Commons )

4) Draw out the information in a visual form

”A great strategy is making diagrams, or visual models, or flowcharts. In a beginning psychology course, you could diagram the flow of classical conditioning . Sure, you can read about classical conditioning, but to truly understand it and be able to write down and describe the different aspects of it on a test later on — condition, stimulus, and so on — it’s a good idea to see if you can put it in a flowchart.

“Anything that creates active learning — generating understanding on your own — is very effective in retention. It basically means the learner needs to become more involved and more engaged, and less passive.”

5) Use flashcards

”Flashcards are another good way of doing this. And one key to using them is actually re-testing yourself on the ones you got right.

keeping a correct card in the deck and encountering it again is more useful

”A lot of students will answer the question on a flashcard, and take it out of the deck if they get it right. But it turns out this isn’t a good idea — repeating the act of memory retrieval is important. Studies show that keeping the correct item in the deck and encountering it again is useful. You might want to practice the incorrect items a little more, but repeated exposure to the ones you get right is important too.

“It’s not that repetition as a whole is bad. It’s that mindless repetition is bad.”

6) Don’t cram — space out your studying

Johannes Simon/Getty Images

”A lot of students cram — they wait until the last minute, then in one evening, they repeat the information again and again. But research shows this isn’t good for long term memory. It may allow you to do okay on that test the next day, but then on the final, you won’t retain as much information, and then the next year, when you need the information for the next level course, it won’t be there.

practice a little bit one day, then two days later

”This often happens in statistics. Students come back for the next year, and it seems like they’ve forgotten everything, because they crammed for their tests.

“The better idea is to space repetition. Practice a little bit one day, then put your flashcards away, then take them out the next day, then two days later. Study after study shows that spacing is really important.”

7) Teachers should space out and mix up their lessons too

Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images

”Our book also has information for teachers. And our educational system tends to promote massed presentation of information as well.

”In a typical college course, you cover one topic one day, then on the second day, another topic, then on the third day, another topic. This is massed presentation. You never go back and recycle or reconsider the material.

”But the key, for teachers, is to put the material back in front of a student days or weeks later. There are several ways they can do this. Here at Washington University, there are some instructors who give weekly quizzes, and used to just put material from that week’s classes on the quiz. Now, they’re bringing back more material from two to three weeks ago. One psychology lecturer explicitly takes time, during each lecture, to bring back material from days or weeks beforehand.

the key, for teachers, is to put the material back in front of a student days or weeks later

”This can be done in homework too. It’s typical, in statistics courses, to give homework in which all of the problems are all in the same category. After correlations are taught, a student’s homework, say, is problem after problem on correlation. Then the next week, T tests are taught, and all the problems are on T tests. But we’ve found that sprinkling in questions on stuff that was covered two or three weeks ago is really good for retention.

”And this can be built into the content of lessons themselves. Let’s say you’re taking an art history class. When I took it, I learned about Gauguin, then I saw lots of his paintings, then I moved on to Matisse, and saw lots of paintings by him. Students and instructors both think that this is a good way of learning the painting styles of these different artists.

”But experimental studies show that’s not the case at all. It’s better to give students an example of one artist, then move to another, then another, then recycle back around. That interspersing, or mixing, produces much better learning that can be transferred to paintings you haven’t seen — letting students accurately identify the creators of paintings, say, on a test.

“And this works for all sorts of problems. Let’s go back to statistics. In upper level classes, and the real world, you’re not going to be told what sort of statistical problem you’re encountering — you’re going to have to figure out the method you need to use. And you can’t learn how to do that unless you have experience dealing with a mix of different types of problems, and diagnosing which requires which type of approach.”

8) There’s no such thing as a “math person”

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

”There’s some really interesting work by Carol Dweck , at Stanford. She’s shown that students tend to have one of two mindsets about learning.

it turns out that mindsets predict how well students end up doing

”One is a fixed learning model. It says, ‘I have a certain amount of talent for this topic — say, chemistry or physics — and I’ll do well until I hit that limit. Past that, it’s too hard for me, and I’m not going to do well.’ The other mindset is a growth mindset. It says that learning involves using effective strategies, putting aside time to do the work, and engaging in the process, all of which help you gradually increase your capacity for a topic.

”It turns out that the mindsets predict how well students end up doing. Students with growth mindsets tend to stick with it, tend to persevere in the face of difficulty, and tend to be successful in challenging classes. Students with the fixed mindset tend not to.

“So for teachers, the lesson is that if you can talk to students and suggest that a growth mindset really is the more accurate model — and it is — then students tend to be more open to trying new strategies, and sticking with the course, and working in ways that are going to promote learning. Ability, intelligence, and learning have to do with how you approach it — working smarter, we like to say.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Is My Kid the Asshole?

Is Homework Helpful or Harmful?

Research suggests homework doesn’t make young kids smarter. but it may widen the achievement gap..

Welcome to  Is My Kid the Asshole? , a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can  read more about here . If you like it, please  subscribe  and/or  share  this post with someone else who would too.

Hello! I’m excited to be sharing my inaugural Dear Melinda column . This week it’s free for everyone, but next week my Friday column will only go out to paid subscribers , so don’t forget to subscribe. These columns will address a broad range of parenting questions with science.

Right before the pandemic hit, I dug into the science of homework. I had heard from parents that many elementary-aged kids were getting more than the recommended amount — the National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association have long advised that students should get a maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level per night, meaning that first graders should have at most 10 minutes, second graders 20 minutes, and so on — and I wondered: What do we know about how homework affects young kids? Does it help them learn? Does it pose any downsides?

Now that kids are back in school again (and my kids, at least, are once again getting homework), I thought it would be a good time to share what I learned.

First, it’s important to point out that kids didn’t always get homework. In the early 20th century, educators and politicians were adamantly against it. The California state legislature passed a law banning homework for children under the age of 15 in 1901, and in 1930, the American Child Health Association lumped homework in with child labor as the “chief causes of the high death and morbidity rates from tuberculosis and heart disease among adolescents.” Oh my.

Everything changed when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Worries mounted that American children weren’t as smart as their Russian counterparts. At that point, “homework became an instrument of national defense policy,” explained Carnegie Mellon historian Steven Schlossman and education researcher Brian Gill in a 2011 paper . From 1952 to 1962, the proportion of homework that high schoolers reported doing every night tripled. It dipped again in the anti-establishment ’60s, but in 1983, President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education lamented  that “our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world” and called for more homework to help address that concern.

All that is to say: Arguments over homework aren’t new. What’s interesting about this historical back-and-forth, though, is that it has centered almost entirely around homework in high school. At no point did educators and politicians argue that elementary school students should be doing homework. Until very recently.

In 1984, just over 40 percent of American 9-year-olds were doing up to an hour of homework a night. In 2012, that percentage had risen to 57 percent. (These may well be underestimates, too: The numbers are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, which ask students how much homework they had the night before, but teachers often ease up on homework the night before standardized tests.) A 2015 survey of nearly 1,200 parents in Rhode Island revealed that even kindergartners were spending an average of 25 minutes each night on schoolwork.  

Pro-homework experts argue that, in addition to helping young kids master lessons, homework is crucial because it teaches self-discipline, responsibility, resilience and conscientiousness. The anti-homework camp, on the other hand, thinks it’s busy work that does more harm than good: “Young children need time outside to move their bodies, free time to recover from the structure and demands placed on them, and quiet time to be alone with their thoughts,” said Emily W. King, a child psychologist in private practice in Raleigh, N.C., and a former school psychologist. Kids also need sleep, and yet surveys show that the more homework kids have, the less sleep they get.

In my house, there’s a four-hour window between the end of the school day and the beginning of the bedtime shuffle. After squeezing in sports, dinner and showers for my kids, there’s barely any time for downtime or imaginative play. The last thing I want to do is sit my kids back down to do more schoolwork.

Plus, overall, the research suggests that homework in elementary school doesn’t do much good.

In middle school and high school, research does generally find a positive association between homework and achievement (though the effects can be hard to tease out; kids who do more homework might fare better because they might come from higher-income families, attend better schools, or are simply more motivated). But that is not the case in elementary school.

In what is by far the most comprehensive analysis of the research on homework, published in 2006, Harris Cooper, a neuroscientist and social psychologist at Duke, and his colleagues found no relationship between the amount of homework elementary school students did and their overall academic achievement. In 2019, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, average mathematics test scores were actually lower among fourth graders whose teachers assigned more than 30 minutes of math homework a day.

“There is a misconception that the more homework you give, the more rigorous the education,” said Cathy Vatterott, a professor of education at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and a former middle school teacher and principal.

And yet some experts keep insisting on its value, arguing that homework helps children learn complex tasks and develop resilience. Cooper, the neuroscientist whose study found no relationship between homework and achievement in elementary school, agrees, arguing that homework builds conscientiousness. 

I certainly want my kids to develop these skills. But when I hunted for research to support this assertion, all I could find was one 2017 study reporting that German fifth graders who spent more effort on their homework also became more conscientious over the next three years compared to students who put less effort into their homework. When I asked Cooper why, if homework makes elementary school kids more conscientious, this skill isn’t reflected in better academic performance, he told me it’s partly because kids aren’t doing enough homework for it to show an effect.

Even if homework does teach kids to be conscientious, other activities achieve the same goal. “Washing the dishes will teach discipline,” says Barbara Stengel, an education professor emerita at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education. “Making your bed in the morning will teach discipline.” My son developed resilience playing soccer (especially since his team usually lost); my daughter has learned self-control helping her dad make pancakes.

And too much homework can deprive kids of activities that we know are enriching. Childhood is the one and only period in which we get to enjoy imaginative play and explore diverse interests, yet adults seem hellbent on taking that freedom away and starting the never-ending grind of “real life” ever earlier. It’s cruel — and counterproductive. Studies have shown, for instance, that young kids learn more academic skills when they attend play-based schools rather than more academically oriented schools.

Many educators and psychologists therefore argue that elementary school homework is, for most students, more of a burden than a boon. This can be especially true for disadvantaged kids, who may not have a quiet place in which to do their homework, or who have to look after their siblings, or who don’t have parents (or tutors) available to help with confusing assignments. In these situations, homework can become a major source of stress, a situation in which “all we’re doing is taking family time away, reinforcing failure and causing confusion,” Stengel said.

Some research even suggests that homework worsens the achievement gap, which is as vast now as it was back in 1954.

In a 2011 study , the economist Marte Ronning analyzed data from more than 4,000 Dutch elementary school students, and found that in classes that assigned homework, the test score gap between the highest and lowest-achieving students was larger than it was in classes that did not assign homework.

In another 2011 study of American students, the sociologist Jonathan Daw analyzed how homework shapes individual achievement over time, concluding that homework widens the achievement gap in math, science and reading in secondary school.

A recent study published in American Sociological Review reveals an even more disturbing phenomenon — that disadvantaged kids, who often have the most trouble completing their homework, are also punished for their homework failings more than their wealthier classmates are. The research was conducted before the pandemic by Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University. She spent two and a half years studying the third-, fourth- and fifth-grade classes at a public elementary school in a suburb in the Northeast. She conducted in-depth interviews with teachers, administrators, parents and students, observed classes and collected data.

In the classes, the standard punishment for forgotten or incomplete homework was for students to stay in for recess and receive a lower grade. But high-income students, she found, were far less likely to be punished for missing homework than low-income students were.

Calarco attributes this discrepancy in part to teacher incentives. It’s not hard for teachers to discern their students’ economic backgrounds; in fact, it’s part of their job to know what students are dealing with at home. And it’s especially obvious which kids have the wealthiest parents: These are the parents who are most likely to volunteer their time in the classroom and raise money for the school as members of the parent-teacher association. Teachers, Calarco found, treat these children differently. The teachers know it, too, but they don’t feel they have a choice.

“They want to enforce the rules,” she explained, “but at the same time, they worry that if they do enforce those homework rules, they will end up creating conflict with especially the highly involved, privileged parents on whom they are most dependent.”

Calarco speculates that teachers may also subconsciously believe that poorer students needed more strict rules, because they assume the children are not getting that structure from their parents.

One fifth grade student Calarco interviewed for her study was a lower-income student whose mother ran a home day care. When he got home from school each day, he was surrounded by the children his mother cared for, many of whom didn’t leave until 6:30. His mother would try to get him to do his homework anyway, but he would often nod off, get distracted or need to help his ailing grandfather, who also lived with them. By the time she could really sit him down to work on it, it would be 8:30 or 9, and often he wouldn’t get it done. His teacher concluded that “school just isn’t a priority in their house,” and rarely granted him exemptions from the homework rules.

“My sense,” Calarco told me, is that the teachers thought the poorer kids “needed stability and consistency and rules” in a way that higher-income students did not. “And they made those judgments even when — and sometimes because — they knew what those students were facing at home,” she added.

This study is small, of course, based on just one school. But with the other evidence, it makes me wonder: Given that one of our country’s key educational goals is to close the achievement gap, do we really want to be doubling down on an educational tool that seems to do the exact opposite?

There’s a better way forward. Some schools and districts are cutting down on the more rote forms of homework — worksheets and the like — in elementary school. In 2019, 16 percent of American fourth graders reported getting no math homework the night before, compared with only 4 percent in 2015. Instead, many schools are focusing homework assignments on reading, and sometimes that’s all they require.

It’s hard to know how homework amounts will shift now that kids are back in school this year. I hope that they will continue to follow a downward trajectory (and a very unscientific poll I conducted on Twitter yesterday suggests that so far this year, they are), but I worry that some schools will be so focused on catching kids up after last year that they might, instead, start to assign more. This could be an unwelcome burden for students who are already struggling with the transition back to school amid strict Covid-19 protocols.

But maybe, after such a trying year, schools will recognize that the emotional health of their students should be priority — and that homework doesn’t provide much of a benefit. My second grader has had upwards of 40 minutes of homework some nights this fall — one afternoon walking home from the school bus, she burst into tears over how much she had — but I was relieved to hear her teacher tell us during their virtual Curriculum Night earlier this week that if homework causes our kids stress or frustration, we should skip it. We will absolutely do this when it feels warranted — and given what I know from the research, I will not second-guess my decision.

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my newsletter ! Remember, too, that Founding Members will receive a free signed copy of my book, HOW TO RAISE KIDS WHO AREN’T ASSHOLES.

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January 1, 2015

13 min read

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

HINT: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on “process”—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

By Carol S. Dweck

A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son's confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

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Praising children's innate abilities, as Jonathan's parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

The Opportunity of Defeat I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon, all then at the University of Pennsylvania, had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can effect change—a state they called learned helplessness.

People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.

In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many more problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easier problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.

Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.

Two Views of Intelligence Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that's that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort or acquirable skills, not fixed ability, they can be remedied by perseverance. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell, then at Columbia University, and Kali H. Trzesniewski, then at Stanford University, and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students' mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't really change.” We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.

As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.

The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with less regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.

Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.

Along with psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, now at Columbia, I found a similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a 2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course. Although all the students cared about grades, the ones who earned the best grades were those who placed a high premium on learning rather than on showing that they were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these students.

Confronting Deficiencies A belief in fixed intelligence also makes people less willing to admit to errors or to confront and remedy their deficiencies in school, at work and in their social relationships. In a study published in 1999 of 168 freshmen entering the University of Hong Kong, where all instruction and coursework are in English, three Hong Kong colleagues and I found that students with a growth mind-set who scored poorly on their English proficiency exam were far more inclined to take a remedial English course than were low-scoring students with a fixed mind-set. The students with a stagnant view of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to correct it.

A fixed mind-set can similarly hamper communication and progress in the workplace by leading managers and employees to discourage or ignore constructive criticism and advice. Research by psychologists Peter Heslin, now at the University of New South Wales in Australia, Don VandeWalle of Southern Methodist University and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto shows that managers who have a fixed mind-set are less likely to seek or welcome feedback from their employees than are managers with a growth mind-set. Presumably, managers with a growth mind-set see themselves as works-in-progress and understand that they need feedback to improve, whereas bosses with a fixed mind-set are more likely to see criticism as reflecting their underlying level of competence. Assuming that other people are not capable of changing either, executives with a fixed mind-set are also less likely to mentor their underlings. But after Heslin, VandeWalle and Latham gave managers a tutorial on the value and principles of the growth mind-set, supervisors became more willing to coach their employees and gave more useful advice.

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people's willingness—or unwillingness—to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them, according to a 2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath, now at Wake Forest University. After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.

Proper Praise How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about mathematical geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up children by telling them how brilliant and talented they are, our research suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, psychologist Claudia M. Mueller, now at Stanford, and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that's a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their process: “Wow … that's a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their process. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their hard work did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

Making Up Your Mind-set In addition to encouraging a growth mind-set through praise for effort, parents and teachers can help children by providing explicit instruction regarding the mind as a learning machine. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and I designed an eight-session workshop for 91 students whose math grades were declining in their first year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students received instruction in study skills only, whereas the others attended a combination of study skills sessions and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-set and how to apply it to schoolwork.

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don't have to be dumb?”

As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids who learned only study skills continued to decline, whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set training stopped falling and began to bounce back to their former levels. Despite being unaware that there were two types of instruction, teachers reported noticing significant motivational changes in 27 percent of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as compared with only 9 percent of students in the control group. One teacher wrote: “Your workshop has already had an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts in any extra effort and often doesn't turn in homework on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment early so I could review it and give him a chance to revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and lower.)”

Other researchers have replicated our results. Psychologists Catherine Good, now at Baruch College, Joshua Aronson of New York University and Michael Inzlicht, now at the University of Toronto, reported in 2003 that a growth mind-set workshop raised the math and English achievement test scores of seventh graders. In a 2002 study Aronson, Good (then a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin) and their colleagues found that college students began to enjoy their schoolwork more, value it more highly and get better grades as a result of training that fostered a growth mind-set.

We have now encapsulated such instruction in an interactive computer program called Brainology. Its five modules teach students about the brain—what it does and how to make it work better. In a virtual brain lab, users can click on brain regions to determine their functions or on nerve endings to see how connections form or strengthen when people learn. Users can also advise virtual students with problems as a way of practicing how to handle schoolwork difficulties; additionally, users keep an online journal of their study practices.

New York City seventh graders who tested Brainology told us that the program had changed their view of learning and how to promote it. One wrote: “My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u [sic] learn something there are connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I'm in school.” A teacher said of the students who used the program: “They offer to practice, study, take notes, or pay attention to ensure that connections will be made.”

Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to get them to study. People may well differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort. Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute more to school achievement than IQ does.

Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For instance, many young athletes value talent more than hard work and have consequently become unteachable. Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs without constant praise and encouragement to maintain their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our homes and schools, however, we will give our children the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become productive workers and citizens. —Carol S. Dweck

A for Effort According to a survey we conducted in the mid-1990s, 85 percent of parents believed that praising children's ability or intelligence when they perform well is important for making them feel smart. But our work shows that praising a child's intelligence makes a child fragile and defensive. So, too, does generic praise that suggests a stable trait, such as “You are a good artist.” Praise can be very valuable, however, if it is carefully worded. Praise for the specific process a child used to accomplish something fosters motivation and confidence by focusing children on the actions that lead to success. Such process praise may involve commending effort, strategies, focus, persistence in the face of difficulty, and willingness to take on challenges. The following are examples of such communications:

You did a good job drawing. I like the detail you added to the people's faces.

You really studied for your social studies test. You read the material over several times, outlined it and tested yourself on it. It really worked!

I like the way you tried a lot of different strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.

That was a hard English assignment, but you stuck with it until you got it done. You stayed at your desk and kept your concentration. That's great!

I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the apparatus, making the parts and building it. You are going to learn a lot of great things.

Parents and teachers can also teach children to enjoy the process of learning by expressing positive views of challenges, effort and mistakes. Here are some examples:

Boy, this is hard—this is fun.

Oh, sorry, that was too easy—no fun. Let's do something more challenging that you can learn from.

Let's all talk about what we struggled with today and learned from. I'll go first.

Mistakes are so interesting. Here's a wonderful mistake.

Let's see what we can learn from it. —C.S.D.

Carol S. Dweck is Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She has held professorships at Columbia University, the University of Illinois and Harvard University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She is the author of the bestselling book Mindset .

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Homework: No Proven Benefits

Why homework is a pointless and outdated habit.

This is an excerpt from Alfie Kohn's recently published book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. For one teacher's response to this excerpt, read In Defense of Homework: Is there Such a Thing as Too Much? .

It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that no study has ever demonstrated any academic benefit to assigning homework before children are in high school. In fact, even in high school, the association between homework and achievement is weak -- and the data don't show that homework is responsible for higher achievement. (Correlation doesn't imply causation.)

Finally, there isn't a shred of evidence to support the folk wisdom that homework provides nonacademic benefits at any age -- for example, that it builds character, promotes self-discipline, or teaches good work habits. We're all familiar with the downside of homework: the frustration and exhaustion, the family conflict, time lost for other activities, and possible diminution of children's interest in learning. But the stubborn belief that all of this must be worth it, that the gain must outweigh the pain, relies on faith rather than evidence.

So why does homework continue to be assigned and accepted? Possible reasons include a lack of respect for research, a lack of respect for children (implicit in a determination to keep them busy after school), a lack of understanding about the nature of learning (implicit in the emphasis on practicing skills and the assertion that homework "reinforces" school lessons), or the top-down pressures to teach more stuff faster in order to pump up test scores so we can chant "We're number one!"

All of these explanations are plausible, but I think there's also something else responsible for our continuing to feed children this latter-day cod-liver oil. We don't ask challenging questions about homework because we don't ask challenging questions about most things. Too many of us sound like Robert Frost's neighbor, the man who "will not go behind his father's saying." Too many of us, when pressed about some habit or belief we've adopted, are apt to reply, "Well, that's just the way I was raised" -- as if it were impossible to critically examine the values one was taught. Too many of us, including some who work in the field of education, seem to have lost our capacity to be outraged by the outrageous; when handed foolish and destructive mandates, we respond by asking for guidance on how best to carry them out.

Passivity is a habit acquired early. From our first days in school we are carefully instructed in what has been called the "hidden curriculum": how to do what one is told and stay out of trouble. There are rewards, both tangible and symbolic, for those who behave properly and penalties for those who don't. As students, we're trained to sit still, listen to what the teacher says, run our highlighters across whatever words in the book we'll be required to commit to memory. Pretty soon, we become less likely to ask (or even wonder) whether what we're being taught really makes sense. We just want to know whether it's going to be on the test.

When we find ourselves unhappy with some practice or policy, we're encouraged to focus on incidental aspects of what's going on, to ask questions about the details of implementation -- how something will get done, or by whom, or on what schedule -- but not whether it should be done at all. The more that we attend to secondary concerns, the more the primary issues -- the overarching structures and underlying premises -- are strengthened. We're led to avoid the radical questions -- and I use that adjective in its original sense: Radical comes from the Latin word for "root." It's partly because we spend our time worrying about the tendrils that the weed continues to grow. Noam Chomsky put it this way: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum -- even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

Parents have already been conditioned to accept most of what is done to their children at school, for example, and so their critical energies are confined to the periphery. Sometimes I entertain myself by speculating about how ingrained this pattern really is. If a school administrator were to announce that, starting next week, students will be made to stand outside in the rain and memorize the phone book, I suspect we parents would promptly speak up . . . to ask whether the Yellow Pages will be included. Or perhaps we'd want to know how much of their grade this activity will count for. One of the more outspoken moms might even demand to know whether her child will be permitted to wear a raincoat.

Our education system, meanwhile, is busily avoiding important topics in its own right. For every question that's asked in this field, there are other, more vital questions that are never raised. Educators weigh different techniques of "behavior management" but rarely examine the imperative to focus on behavior -- that is, observable actions -- rather than on reasons and needs and the children who have them. Teachers think about what classroom rules they ought to introduce but are unlikely to ask why they're doing so unilaterally, why students aren't participating in such decisions. It's probably not a coincidence that most schools of education require prospective teachers to take a course called Methods, but there is no course called Goals.

And so we return to the question of homework. Parents anxiously grill teachers about their policies on this topic, but they mostly ask about the details of the assignments their children will be made to do. If homework is a given, it's certainly understandable that one would want to make sure it's being done "correctly." But this begs the question of whether, and why, it should be a given. The willingness not to ask provides another explanation for how a practice can persist even if it hurts more than helps.

For their part, teachers regularly witness how many children are made miserable by homework and how many resist doing it. Some respond with sympathy and respect. Others reach for bribes and threats to compel students to turn in the assignments; indeed, they may insist these inducements are necessary: "If the kids weren't being graded, they'd never do it!" Even if true, this is less an argument for grades and other coercive tactics than an invitation to reconsider the value of those assignments. Or so one might think. However, teachers had to do homework when they were students, and they've likely been expected to give it at every school where they've worked. The idea that homework must be assigned is the premise, not the conclusion -- and it's a premise that's rarely examined by educators.

Unlike parents and teachers, scholars are a step removed from the classroom and therefore have the luxury of pursuing potentially uncomfortable areas of investigation. But few do. Instead, they are more likely to ask, "How much time should students spend on homework?" or "Which strategies will succeed in improving homework completion rates?," which is simply assumed to be desirable.

Policy groups, too, are more likely to act as cheerleaders than as thoughtful critics. The major document on the subject issued jointly by the National PTA and the National Education Association, for example, concedes that children often complain about homework, but never considers the possibility that their complaints may be justified. Parents are exhorted to "show your children that you think homework is important" -- regardless of whether it is, or even whether one really believes this is true -- and to praise them for compliance.

Health professionals, meanwhile, have begun raising concerns about the weight of children's backpacks and then recommending . . . exercises to strengthen their backs! This was also the tack taken by People magazine: An article about families struggling to cope with excessive homework was accompanied by a sidebar that offered some "ways to minimize the strain on young backs" -- for example, "pick a [back]pack with padded shoulder straps."

The People article reminds us that the popular press does occasionally -- cyclically -- take note of how much homework children have to do, and how varied and virulent are its effects. But such inquiries are rarely penetrating and their conclusions almost never rock the boat. Time magazine published a cover essay in 2003 entitled "The Homework Ate My Family." It opened with affecting and even alarming stories of homework's harms. Several pages later, however, it closed with a finger-wagging declaration that "both parents and students must be willing to embrace the 'work' component of homework -- to recognize the quiet satisfaction that comes from practice and drill." Likewise, an essay on the Family Education Network's Web site: "Yes, homework is sometimes dull, or too easy, or too difficult. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously." (One wonders what would have to be true before we'd be justified in not taking something seriously.)

Nor, apparently, are these questions seen as appropriate by most medical and mental health professionals. When a child resists doing homework -- or complying with other demands -- their job is to get the child back on track. Very rarely is there any inquiry into the value of the homework or the reasonableness of the demands.

Sometimes parents are invited to talk to teachers about homework -- providing that their concerns are "appropriate." The same is true of formal opportunities for offering feedback. A list of sample survey questions offered to principals by the central office in one Colorado school district is typical. Parents were asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the following statements: "My child understands how to do his/her homework"; "Teachers at this school give me useful suggestions about how to help my child with schoolwork"; "Homework assignments allow me to see what my student is being taught and how he/she is learning"; and "The amount of homework my child receives is (choose one): too much/just right/too little."

The most striking feature of such a list is what isn't on it. Such a questionnaire seems to have been designed to illustrate Chomsky's point about encouraging lively discussion within a narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion, the better to reinforce the key presuppositions of the system. Parents' feedback is earnestly sought -- on these questions only. So, too, for the popular articles that criticize homework, or the parents who speak out: The focus is generally limited to how much is being assigned. I'm sympathetic to this concern, but I'm more struck by how it misses much of what matters. We sometimes forget that not everything that's destructive when done to excess is innocuous when done in moderation. Sometimes the problem is with what's being done, or at least the way it's being done, rather than just with how much of it is being done.

The more we are invited to think in Goldilocks terms (too much, too little, or just right?), the less likely we become to step back and ask the questions that count: What reason is there to think that any quantity of the kind of homework our kids are getting is really worth doing? What evidence exists to show that daily homework, regardless of its nature, is necessary for children to become better thinkers? Why did the students have no chance to participate in deciding which of their assignments ought to be taken home?

And: What if there was no homework at all?

Why Homework Helps: A Defense of Homework

Yes, we’re talking about why homework helps.

No, seriously. 

We know homework isn’t usually considered fun but, it doesn’t have to be fun to be helpful . We’d definitely understand why you might see it as a waste of time, that’s why for today’s blog we’re going to break down why homework is helpful for its learning benefits and its utility.

Reinforcing Learning

Homework serves as a valuable tool for reinforcing what students have learned in the classroom. When you learn topics in class, they’re often explained in a way that you can understand the material but, the real learning comes when you begin doing the work yourself. After all, there’s a reason why the expression “learn by doing” is a thing. By actively engaging with the material, you allow yourself to internalize concepts and improve in your own way, at your own pace.

Practicing Skills

Another reason why homework is important is that it allows you to practice and refine your skills. Whether it’s solving math problems, writing essays, or conducting scientific experiments, practice is crucial for mastery. Homework provides the necessary practice that helps you develop a deeper level of proficiency in various subjects. 

We actually go into the science of studying with practice examples in our blog post, Strategies for Studying Smarter, Not Hard . We’re not just saying this because we’re an educational site and we want you to like homework. We’re saying this because scientifically, practicing these skills will make you better at critical thinking and problem-solving. Will you always need to know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? Maybe, maybe not. Will you need to know how to quickly retrieve information to solve problems satisfactorily for the rest of your life? Absolutely.

Homework Provides Easy Grade Points

Everyone at some point or another has had a term riding on one particular test or exam and it definitely doesn’t feel great. Most of this time this is because of poor performance with assignments thus leading to lower grades. Homework assignments however, are an easy way to boost and reinforce your total GPA so that exams aren’t as a big of a deal (you should still prep for them responsibly however). 

This is what we mean when we say the utility of homework. Even if you feel like it’s not doing you any favors which, scientifically isn’t true, it is certainly doing your GPA a favor. Getting exceptional passing grades is easier on assignments because you can check your answers, ensure the correct responses are provided, and scoop up an easy A in the progress. Don’t be so quick to hate on homework, as long as you do it all, it’s actually doing you a favor!

Preparation for Tests

Homework plays a significant role in preparing you for assessments such as quizzes, tests, and exams. When you consistently complete homework assignments, you actively review and reinforce the material, making it easier to recall during assessments. Homework helps you identify areas where you need additional practice or clarification, enabling you to seek help before important evaluations.

The Wrap-Up

Contrary to popular belief, homework can be a valuable tool for students. It reinforces learning, provides practice, provides an easier source of solid points, and prepares you for assessments. So next time you sit down to do your homework, remember the benefits it brings to your education. Embrace it as an opportunity to grow and excel in your academic journey!

Rob Shield is based out of Columbus, Ohio. As Numerade's copywriter, Rob uses their extensive background in education to inform and shape the topics and content posted to the blog for educators, parents, and students alike.

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Studying 101: Study Smarter Not Harder

Do you ever feel like your study habits simply aren’t cutting it? Do you wonder what you could be doing to perform better in class and on exams? Many students realize that their high school study habits aren’t very effective in college. This is understandable, as college is quite different from high school. The professors are less personally involved, classes are bigger, exams are worth more, reading is more intense, and classes are much more rigorous. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you; it just means you need to learn some more effective study skills. Fortunately, there are many active, effective study strategies that are shown to be effective in college classes.

This handout offers several tips on effective studying. Implementing these tips into your regular study routine will help you to efficiently and effectively learn course material. Experiment with them and find some that work for you.

Reading is not studying

Simply reading and re-reading texts or notes is not actively engaging in the material. It is simply re-reading your notes. Only ‘doing’ the readings for class is not studying. It is simply doing the reading for class. Re-reading leads to quick forgetting.

Think of reading as an important part of pre-studying, but learning information requires actively engaging in the material (Edwards, 2014). Active engagement is the process of constructing meaning from text that involves making connections to lectures, forming examples, and regulating your own learning (Davis, 2007). Active studying does not mean highlighting or underlining text, re-reading, or rote memorization. Though these activities may help to keep you engaged in the task, they are not considered active studying techniques and are weakly related to improved learning (Mackenzie, 1994).

Ideas for active studying include:

• Create a study guide by topic. Formulate questions and problems and write complete answers. Create your own quiz.
• Become a teacher. Say the information aloud in your own words as if you are the instructor and teaching the concepts to a class.
• Derive examples that relate to your own experiences.
• Create concept maps or diagrams that explain the material.
• Develop symbols that represent concepts.
• For non-technical classes (e.g., English, History, Psychology), figure out the big ideas so you can explain, contrast, and re-evaluate them.
• For technical classes, work the problems and explain the steps and why they work.
• Study in terms of question, evidence, and conclusion: What is the question posed by the instructor/author? What is the evidence that they present? What is the conclusion?

Organization and planning will help you to actively study for your courses. When studying for a test, organize your materials first and then begin your active reviewing by topic (Newport, 2007). Often professors provide subtopics on the syllabi. Use them as a guide to help organize your materials. For example, gather all of the materials for one topic (e.g., PowerPoint notes, text book notes, articles, homework, etc.) and put them together in a pile. Label each pile with the topic and study by topics.

For more information on the principle behind active studying, check out our tipsheet on metacognition .

Understand the Study Cycle

The Study Cycle , developed by Frank Christ, breaks down the different parts of studying: previewing, attending class, reviewing, studying, and checking your understanding. Although each step may seem obvious at a glance, all too often students try to take shortcuts and miss opportunities for good learning. For example, you may skip a reading before class because the professor covers the same material in class; doing so misses a key opportunity to learn in different modes (reading and listening) and to benefit from the repetition and distributed practice (see #3 below) that you’ll get from both reading ahead and attending class. Understanding the importance of all stages of this cycle will help make sure you don’t miss opportunities to learn effectively.

Spacing out is good

One of the most impactful learning strategies is “distributed practice”—spacing out your studying over several short periods of time over several days and weeks (Newport, 2007). The most effective practice is to work a short time on each class every day. The total amount of time spent studying will be the same (or less) than one or two marathon library sessions, but you will learn the information more deeply and retain much more for the long term—which will help get you an A on the final. The important thing is how you use your study time, not how long you study. Long study sessions lead to a lack of concentration and thus a lack of learning and retention.

In order to spread out studying over short periods of time across several days and weeks, you need control over your schedule . Keeping a list of tasks to complete on a daily basis will help you to include regular active studying sessions for each class. Try to do something for each class each day. Be specific and realistic regarding how long you plan to spend on each task—you should not have more tasks on your list than you can reasonably complete during the day.

For example, you may do a few problems per day in math rather than all of them the hour before class. In history, you can spend 15-20 minutes each day actively studying your class notes. Thus, your studying time may still be the same length, but rather than only preparing for one class, you will be preparing for all of your classes in short stretches. This will help focus, stay on top of your work, and retain information.

In addition to learning the material more deeply, spacing out your work helps stave off procrastination. Rather than having to face the dreaded project for four hours on Monday, you can face the dreaded project for 30 minutes each day. The shorter, more consistent time to work on a dreaded project is likely to be more acceptable and less likely to be delayed to the last minute. Finally, if you have to memorize material for class (names, dates, formulas), it is best to make flashcards for this material and review periodically throughout the day rather than one long, memorization session (Wissman and Rawson, 2012). See our handout on memorization strategies to learn more.

It’s good to be intense

Not all studying is equal. You will accomplish more if you study intensively. Intensive study sessions are short and will allow you to get work done with minimal wasted effort. Shorter, intensive study times are more effective than drawn out studying.

In fact, one of the most impactful study strategies is distributing studying over multiple sessions (Newport, 2007). Intensive study sessions can last 30 or 45-minute sessions and include active studying strategies. For example, self-testing is an active study strategy that improves the intensity of studying and efficiency of learning. However, planning to spend hours on end self-testing is likely to cause you to become distracted and lose your attention.

On the other hand, if you plan to quiz yourself on the course material for 45 minutes and then take a break, you are much more likely to maintain your attention and retain the information. Furthermore, the shorter, more intense sessions will likely put the pressure on that is needed to prevent procrastination.

Silence isn’t golden

Know where you study best. The silence of a library may not be the best place for you. It’s important to consider what noise environment works best for you. You might find that you concentrate better with some background noise. Some people find that listening to classical music while studying helps them concentrate, while others find this highly distracting. The point is that the silence of the library may be just as distracting (or more) than the noise of a gymnasium. Thus, if silence is distracting, but you prefer to study in the library, try the first or second floors where there is more background ‘buzz.’

Keep in mind that active studying is rarely silent as it often requires saying the material aloud.

Problems are your friend

Working and re-working problems is important for technical courses (e.g., math, economics). Be able to explain the steps of the problems and why they work.

In technical courses, it is usually more important to work problems than read the text (Newport, 2007). In class, write down in detail the practice problems demonstrated by the professor. Annotate each step and ask questions if you are confused. At the very least, record the question and the answer (even if you miss the steps).

When preparing for tests, put together a large list of problems from the course materials and lectures. Work the problems and explain the steps and why they work (Carrier, 2003).

Reconsider multitasking

A significant amount of research indicates that multi-tasking does not improve efficiency and actually negatively affects results (Junco, 2012).

In order to study smarter, not harder, you will need to eliminate distractions during your study sessions. Social media, web browsing, game playing, texting, etc. will severely affect the intensity of your study sessions if you allow them! Research is clear that multi-tasking (e.g., responding to texts, while studying), increases the amount of time needed to learn material and decreases the quality of the learning (Junco, 2012).

Eliminating the distractions will allow you to fully engage during your study sessions. If you don’t need your computer for homework, then don’t use it. Use apps to help you set limits on the amount of time you can spend at certain sites during the day. Turn your phone off. Reward intensive studying with a social-media break (but make sure you time your break!) See our handout on managing technology for more tips and strategies.

Switch up your setting

Find several places to study in and around campus and change up your space if you find that it is no longer a working space for you.

Know when and where you study best. It may be that your focus at 10:00 PM. is not as sharp as at 10:00 AM. Perhaps you are more productive at a coffee shop with background noise, or in the study lounge in your residence hall. Perhaps when you study on your bed, you fall asleep.

Have a variety of places in and around campus that are good study environments for you. That way wherever you are, you can find your perfect study spot. After a while, you might find that your spot is too comfortable and no longer is a good place to study, so it’s time to hop to a new spot!

Become a teacher

Try to explain the material in your own words, as if you are the teacher. You can do this in a study group, with a study partner, or on your own. Saying the material aloud will point out where you are confused and need more information and will help you retain the information. As you are explaining the material, use examples and make connections between concepts (just as a teacher does). It is okay (even encouraged) to do this with your notes in your hands. At first you may need to rely on your notes to explain the material, but eventually you’ll be able to teach it without your notes.

Creating a quiz for yourself will help you to think like your professor. What does your professor want you to know? Quizzing yourself is a highly effective study technique. Make a study guide and carry it with you so you can review the questions and answers periodically throughout the day and across several days. Identify the questions that you don’t know and quiz yourself on only those questions. Say your answers aloud. This will help you to retain the information and make corrections where they are needed. For technical courses, do the sample problems and explain how you got from the question to the answer. Re-do the problems that give you trouble. Learning the material in this way actively engages your brain and will significantly improve your memory (Craik, 1975).

Take control of your calendar

Controlling your schedule and your distractions will help you to accomplish your goals.

If you are in control of your calendar, you will be able to complete your assignments and stay on top of your coursework. The following are steps to getting control of your calendar:

• On the same day each week, (perhaps Sunday nights or Saturday mornings) plan out your schedule for the week.
• Go through each class and write down what you’d like to get completed for each class that week.
• Look at your calendar and determine how many hours you have to complete your work.
• Determine whether your list can be completed in the amount of time that you have available. (You may want to put the amount of time expected to complete each assignment.) Make adjustments as needed. For example, if you find that it will take more hours to complete your work than you have available, you will likely need to triage your readings. Completing all of the readings is a luxury. You will need to make decisions about your readings based on what is covered in class. You should read and take notes on all of the assignments from the favored class source (the one that is used a lot in the class). This may be the textbook or a reading that directly addresses the topic for the day. You can likely skim supplemental readings.
• Pencil into your calendar when you plan to get assignments completed.
• Before going to bed each night, make your plan for the next day. Waking up with a plan will make you more productive.

See our handout on calendars and college for more tips on using calendars as time management.

Use downtime to your advantage

Beware of ‘easy’ weeks. This is the calm before the storm. Lighter work weeks are a great time to get ahead on work or to start long projects. Use the extra hours to get ahead on assignments or start big projects or papers. You should plan to work on every class every week even if you don’t have anything due. In fact, it is preferable to do some work for each of your classes every day. Spending 30 minutes per class each day will add up to three hours per week, but spreading this time out over six days is more effective than cramming it all in during one long three-hour session. If you have completed all of the work for a particular class, then use the 30 minutes to get ahead or start a longer project.

Use all your resources

Remember that you can make an appointment with an academic coach to work on implementing any of the strategies suggested in this handout.

Works consulted

Carrier, L. M. (2003). College students’ choices of study strategies. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 96 (1), 54-56.

Craik, F. I., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104 (3), 268.

Davis, S. G., & Gray, E. S. (2007). Going beyond test-taking strategies: Building self-regulated students and teachers. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 1 (1), 31-47.

Edwards, A. J., Weinstein, C. E., Goetz, E. T., & Alexander, P. A. (2014). Learning and study strategies: Issues in assessment, instruction, and evaluation. Elsevier.

Junco, R., & Cotten, S. R. (2012). No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59 (2), 505-514.

Mackenzie, A. M. (1994). Examination preparation, anxiety and examination performance in a group of adult students. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13 (5), 373-388.

McGuire, S.Y. & McGuire, S. (2016). Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate in Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Newport, C. (2006). How to become a straight-a student: the unconventional strategies real college students use to score high while studying less. Three Rivers Press.

Paul, K. (1996). Study smarter, not harder. Self Counsel Press.

Robinson, A. (1993). What smart students know: maximum grades, optimum learning, minimum time. Crown trade paperbacks.

Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2012). How and when do students use flashcards? Memory, 20, 568-579.

If you enjoy using our handouts, we appreciate contributions of acknowledgement.

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Degree In Sight

Study smart

Make the most of your study time with these drawn-from-the-research tips.

By Lea Winerman

gradPSYCH Staff

Print version: page 25

You probably think you know how to study.

After all, you've made it to graduate school. You've successfully turned in homework assignments and passed exams for at least 16 years. And there's a good chance that you have your study routine set, whether it's a cup of tea and your textbooks in bed, or a quiet library carrel you've claimed as your own.

But it may be that the study habits you've honed for a decade or two aren't serving you as well as you think they are.

Research has shown that some "common sense" study techniques — such as always reading in the same quiet location, or spending hours at a time concentrating on one subject — don't promote long-term learning. And some habits that you might suspect aren't so great, like last-minute cramming for exams, may be even worse than you thought.

We've rounded up three principles, drawn from decades of cognitive psychology research, to help you get the most out of your studying hours.

Space Your Study Sessions

As course reading piles up, it can be tempting to let yourself fall behind, all the while reassuring yourself that you'll spend two days cramming right before an exam. But while last-minute cramming may allow you to pass a test, you won't remember the material for long, according to Williams College psychologist Nate Kornell, PhD.

Decades of research have demonstrated that spacing out study sessions over a longer period of time improves long-term memory. In other words, if you have 12 hours to spend on a subject, it's better to study it for three hours each week for four weeks than to cram all 12 hours into week four.

And for the most part, the more time you take between study sessions, the better off you are — at least within the time limits of an academic semester.

"At some point, waiting too long [between sessions] could have a negative effect [on learning]," Kornell says. "However, most of us space far too little. Practically speaking, too much spacing is not really a danger anyone should worry about."

Researchers aren't exactly sure why spacing is so effective. However, one possible cause is that, over time, people forget what they learned in their initial study session. Then, when they come back to the material later, the new study session jogs their memory and they recall what they learned the first time around. That process — forgetting and retrieval — helps cement the new knowledge in place.

In one study, published in 2009 in Applied Cognitive Psychology , Kornell showed that the spacing effect works on a smaller time scale as well. He asked college students to study a "stack" of 20 digital vocabulary flashcards. The students all studied each word four times. But half of the students studied the words in one big stack — they went through all 20 words, then started over. The other half of the students studied the words in four smaller stacks of five cards each. So, the students who used the one big stack had a longer spacing time between each of the four times they saw a word.

On a test the next day, the students in the "big stack" group remembered significantly more of the words than the students in the "four small stacks" group — 49 percent as compared with 36 percent.

When it comes to spacing, students are often led astray by their own experiences, says Kent State University psychology professor Katherine Rawson, PhD, who also studies learning. "They cram right before an exam, and to be honest that's probably OK for doing fine on your exam," she says. "But the problem is that it's horrible for long-term retention. Students don't realize that they're really undercutting their own learning."

Interweave Your Subjects

You might think that if you want to learn one thing well, the best thing to do would be to sit down and concentrate on it for as long as you can stand. But research shows that mixing tasks and topics is a better bet.

In one study, published in Psychological Science in 2008, Kornell and University of California, Los Angeles psychologist Robert Bjork, PhD, asked 120 participants to learn the painting styles of 12 artists by looking at six examples of each artist's work. For half of the artists, the participants saw all six paintings in a row. For the other half of the artists, they saw the paintings in a mixed-up order. At the end of the experiment, the participants did a distracting task (counting backward by threes from 547), and then had to identify which artist had painted a new painting. The participants were significantly better at identifying the artists' whose paintings they had studied in an "interwoven" style than the artists whose paintings they'd studied in blocks.

Why does mixing up subject matter help students learn? Again, as in spacing, the key may be in the learning, forgetting and relearning that helps the brain cement the new information for the long-term.

Another factor, Bjork says, could be that the mixing — he calls it "interleaving" — forces students to notice and process the similarities and differences among the things they're trying to learn, giving them a better, deeper understanding of the material.

Despite strong evidence that interleaving works, it can be tough for teachers to work the mixed-up style of teaching into their lectures, he says.

"People expect to be taught the way they're used to being taught," he says. "Most courses involve blocking by topic. If you start interleaving you're going to seem disorganized."

But, he adds, students can bring the method into their own study sessions.

Test Yourself

Testing gets a bad rap: Students don't enjoy taking quizzes, teachers don't like to grade them, and some people bemoan that too many exams can force teachers to "teach to the test" and squeeze creativity out of the classroom.

But done right, testing can be a useful tool to help students learn, researchers say. Decades of research has shown that making yourself recall information helps strengthen your long-term learning, says Henry Roediger, PhD, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has done some of the key research in the area. In other words, students might not enjoy taking a quiz at the end of every class or testing themselves every time they finish reading a chapter, but doing so would probably help them remember the material on the final exam — and even after the class ended.

University of Louisville psychologist Keith Lyle, PhD, used a captive audience — students in his undergraduate statistics classes — to prove the point. In one 75-person class, at the end of each class session he asked students to complete a four- to six-question short-answer quiz about material that had been presented during the lecture. Cumulatively, the quizzes counted for just 8 percent of the students' final grade.

Lyle taught a second class using the same syllabus, but didn't do the daily quizzes. At the end of the semester, he found that students in the quiz class significantly outscored students in the nonquiz class on all four midterm exams.

Roediger says that even though most professors won't use daily quizzes in their courses, students can — and should — test themselves by asking themselves questions during study sessions.

"The problem with repeated rereading, which is what most students do to study, is that it gives you a false sense of familiarity. You feel like you know the material, but you've never tried retrieving it," he says.

Taking the Hard Route

If decades of research have demonstrated that spacing, interweaving and testing help people to learn more effectively, then why don't more students and teachers use these strategies? Perhaps because they're difficult, say Kornell, Bjork and the other researchers.

It's hard to study a topic, then switch to a different subject and wait a week to come back to the first one. When you do, you might feel like you're relearning the material — and, in a sense, you are.

Learning researchers recognize that these strategies aren't easy or fun to put into practice. Bjork, in fact, has labeled the strategies "desirable difficulties." The strategies work because they are difficult — it's the process of learning, forgetting, retrieving and relearning that eventually registers the knowledge in our long-term memory.

"In the short term it's easier not to [use these strategies], but in the long term it pays off a thousand times over," says Kornell.

Putting in the extra work to learn material for the long haul is particularly important for graduate students, he says, because by the time you reach graduate school you're not just trying to pass a test — you're learning things you'll need to have a handle on for the rest of your working life.

"One of the most important transitions you make [at the beginning of graduate school] is realizing that you are really there to learn, not just get good grades," he says.

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If You Say Yes to Any of These 7 Questions, Science Says You're Definitely Smarter Than Average

Even though most run against conventional wisdom. (which in itself is a sign of intelligence, since conventional wisdom is so often wrong.).

Jeff Bezos says the number one sign of high intelligence is a willingness to change your mind -- a lot. He looks for people who can admit they are wrong and readily change their opinions.

That's great, but just like the famous survey where more than 80 percent of respondents  said they were above-average drivers -- which is mathematically impossible, and all the respondents had been injured in car accidents, which is pretty darned ironic -- most of us think we are willing to change our minds when better data, better evidence, or a better point of view comes along. 

Here are some other signs you may be smarter than you think you are:

1. You like to spend time alone.

While people who  socialize more tend to be happier , that's not true if  you're highly intelligent . In that case, socializing with friends will not increase your level of satisfaction with your life.

Researchers followed people  between 18 and 28 years old and found the more frequently the average person socialized, the happier they were -- but not the subset of people studied who were highly intelligent.

The more they socialized, the less happy they were.

One theory is aspirational: The smarter you are, the more focused you will be on longer-term goals, and spending time with friends is distracting rather than helpful.

So if you like to spend time alone to work on a project, to learn something new, to write that business plan, or to grind away at all the steps you need to take to reach your goals, don't assume you're a loner.

You may simply be smarter than the rest of us.

2. You often think you're wrong.

We all know people who take a position, and then proclaim and bluster and pontificate while totally disregarding differing opinions or points of view. They know they're right -- and they want you to know they're right.

Their behavior isn't an indication of intelligence, though. It's the classic sign of the  Dunning-Kruger effect, a type of cognitive bias described by social psychologists  David Dunning  and Justin Kruger in which people believe they're smarter and more skilled than they actually are. Combine a lack of self-awareness with low cognitive ability and boom: You overestimate your own intelligence and competence. 

Wisdom is knowing that while you might know a lot, there's also a lot you don't know. Wisdom is trying to find out what is right rather than trying to  be  right. Wisdom is realizing when you're wrong, and backing down graciously.

If you aren't afraid to be wrong, if you aren't afraid to admit you don't have all the answers, if you aren't afraid to say "I think" instead of "I know," then you're likely to be smarter than you think.

3. You like to cuss.

Conventional wisdom says people who swear tend to have limited vocabularies; the F -word is your favorite adjective because you don't have better modifiers at your disposal. 

Turns out conventional wisdom is wrong. According to this research , "The ability to generate taboo language is not an index of overall language poverty."

In short, fluency is fluency. 

So don't assume you're stupid just because you like to use certain cuss words as adjectives and nouns and verbs, sometimes all in the same sentence.

4. You don't get up early.

If you like to get up early, you're in good company:  The Wall Street Journal  says that 4 a.m. may be the most productive time of the day.

Yet research shows that night owls -- people who feel more alert and productive well after the sun goes down -- are  more likely to have higher intelligence , better jobs, and  larger incomes than early risers .

But that doesn't mean you have to wake up late to be successful. Or wake up early. 

Waking up at an arbitrary time won't help you succeed. Making a thoughtful decision to wake up at the time that's most productive for you is all that matters.

5. You can delay gratification.

Research shows a definite link between intelligence and self-control. In this study , participants chose between two rewards:

• Receiving a smaller, immediate financial reward, or
• Receiving a larger financial reward at a later date. 

People who chose to wait for the larger reward tended to score higher on intelligence tests.

Makes sense: Having the ability to objectively weigh two outcomes and choose the better option is an obvious sign of intelligence.

So if you're willing to exercise a little self-control in order to maximize the fruits of your effort, labor, investments, etc., you may be smarter than you think.

And are much more likely to be successful .

6. You procrastinate.

We all put things off. But few people would assume that putting off something important is a sign of intelligence.

Actually, no. Adam Grant sees procrastination as a key to innovation. As Grant says , "The time Steve Jobs was putting things off and noodling on possibilities was time well spent in letting more divergent ideas come to the table, as opposed to diving right in with the most conventional, the most obvious, the most familiar."

So if you're putting something off just because you don't feel like working on it, that's one thing. But if you're putting something off because you don't feel you've found the best solution, the best path, or the best option, that might be the smartest approach to take.

7. You fail this test.

Here's a really quick test you can take to get an indication of your IQ. Researchers at the University of Rochester  created a test to determine the brain's unconscious ability to filter out  visual movement. 

First, watch this brief video. The goal is to detect which way the black and white bars drift, whether from left to right or right to left.

The images were presented in different sizes because, generally speaking, it's harder for most people to see movement in larger images. Our brains tend to filter out background movement -- otherwise the world would seem incredibly cluttered and we would be easily distracted. That's why most people do best on the smallest version of the bars; motion perception is optimal in an area roughly the width of your thumb when your hand is extended.

And that's why, when participants observed the smallest image, the people with higher IQ scores were faster at determining the movement of the bars. People with higher IQs tend to make faster perceptual judgments and have quicker reflexes. 

But when participants observed the largest image, those with higher IQs performed worse; the higher a person's IQ, the slower they were at detecting movement.

"From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse," said one of the researchers. That means their ability to focus is naturally better: They better filter out background movement to focus on small, nearby moving objects. 

That doesn't mean the test is perfect, but since the task is simple and closely linked to IQ, it may provide clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and therefore more intelligent. ( Efficiency always matters .)

"High IQ is associated with motion perception impairments as stimulus size increases," the researchers said. "The results link intelligence and low-level suppression of sensory information. Suppressive processes are a key constraint of both intelligence and perception."

All of which means that if you had a much harder time determining the direction of movement of the bars when the image was large than when it was small, you probably have a high IQ. 

And that means you'll be able to  work a lot smarter and harder than the rest of us  -- which doesn't require research to know is a great predictor of future success.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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Why Being Smart Won't Lead To Academic Success

Self-discipline is a balancing act..

Many bright, intelligent, ambitious students have crossed my path throughout my years as a one-on-one academic tutor. Sometimes these students’ parents are confused as to why they don’t seem to be getting the grades they should be getting, or why they aren’t as successful as they are very well capable of being.

Well, it’s not just the parents who are concerned – more often than not, it’s the students themselves. And when I say students, this applies to sixteen-year-olds in high school, all the way to professionals in their mid-thirties trying to get into a graduate program.

What distinguishes top achievers from others? Are they simply smarter? If so, what explains the wide range of performance among individuals of equal “intelligence”?

In a longitudinal study of 140 students by Professor Angela Duckworth, self-discipline predicted final grades, school attendance, and standardized achievement test scores. In a replication with 164 eighth-graders, a behavioral delay-of-gratification task, a questionnaire on study habits, and a group-administered IQ test were added.

Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day at which students began their homework. The effect of self-discipline on final grades held even when controlling for first marking period grades, achievement test scores, and measured IQ.

These findings suggest a common reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline.

Thus, building self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement. Professor Duckworth’s study shows that often, success is not so much about being smart, but about studying smart with the right strategies. For all students, regardless of age or “intelligence,” the key to high achievement lies in figuring out how to incorporate a productive, efficient study system into their already busy lives.

For more study tips from our study skills tutors in Boston and New York, check out these blog posts: Achievement Goals And Why They Matter , Study Skills: 5 Simple Steps for Straight A’s!, and Summer Academics: Make The Most of the “Lazy” Months.

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How Does Homework Help You Be Smarter?

All students hate doing homework. If you try to find the school or college student who considers homework an important part of studying and pays a lot of attention to it, you will probably fail. There are lots of reasons for such behavior. First of all, we mustn’t forget about the complexity of the assignments that are set by teachers and professors. Students don’t have enough time to do it because they are busy with work and so on. 

But it doesn’t mean that all students should hold the view that homework is redundant. Teachers ask you to complete this or that assignment or to carry out research to help you absorb the material, consolidate your knowledge, and master the skills you acquired in lessons. Moreover, students who do homework regularly develop good study habits and get the desire to learn something new. All of these aspects make students smarter, and it’s one of the key objectives of studying. 

Where Can Students Get Assignment Writing Help?

If you’re a student looking for the service to order the papers, A+ Essay is the best choice for you. “I need someone to write my paper for me” — it’s the most widespread message we get every day. Thousands of students choose us and trust their academic performance to us. In case you’re new in this sphere and haven’t ordered anything online before, you may doubt our credibility. It’s okay, so we offer you to get acquainted with our advantages to dispel all doubts:

Students choose us also because the process of placing an order takes only a few minutes. It’s essential to start with calculations because you need to know how much money should be paid for your paper. Find the calculator, indicate the type of paper, the number of pages, deadline, and academic level to see the approximate price. In case it suits you, press “Continue” to be redirected to the order form page. You’ll have to include some details concerning your order, such as the required number of sources, the professor’s requirements, etc.

Use your credit card to pay for the order and wait till the managers select the appropriate writer. Be sure; we’ll notify you about it. You can text this person if you want to discuss the workflow or emphasize the importance of certain details. After you’ve finished it, the writer starts working on the order. You may spend this time as you want; what matters is what you shouldn’t worry about the homework because it’s in the hands of professionals.

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You're not as smart as you think

It seems to be conventional wisdom that people are overconfident in their own abilities. People tend to think they are nicer, smarter, and better looking than most other people. But what's the evidence? The scientist-authors of t his Wall Street Journal summary  explain, 

The claim that "most people think they are smarter than average" is a cliche of popular psychology, but the scientific evidence for it is surprisingly thin. Most research in this area has been conducted using small samples of individuals or only with high school or college students. The most recent study that polled a representative sample of American adults on the topic was published way back in 1965.

The authors, Patrick Heck and Christopher Chabris, worked with a third colleague. 

..[W]e conducted two surveys: one using traditional telephone-polling methods, the other using internet research volunteers. Altogether we asked a combined representative sample of 2,821 Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with the simple statement "I am more intelligent than the average person." 

Here are some of the results:

We found that more than 50% of every subgroup of people -- young and old, white and nonwhite, male and female -- agreed that they are smarter than average. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more men exhibited overconfidence (71% said they were smarter than average) than women (only 59% agreed).

Perhaps "overconfidence" is really accuracy? Consider this pattern of results: 

In our study, confidence increased with education: 73% of people with a graduate degree agreed that they are smarter than average, compared with 71% of college graduates, 62% of people with "some college" experience and just 52% of people who never attended college.

The accessible Wall Street Journal summary is paywalled, but the original empirical publication is o pen-access in PLOS One.

a) What kind of study was this? Survey/poll? Correlational? Experimental? What are its key variables? 

b) The authors found that more than 50% of every subgroup of people considered themselves smarter than average. Why is this result a sign of overconfidence? 

c) The authors of this piece state that their combined sample was "representative". Re-read the section on how they got their sample and then make your own assessment--is the sample representative? (i.e., how is its external validity?). What population of interest do they intend to represent? 

d) Sketch a graph of this result: 

73% of people with a graduate degree agreed that they are smarter than average, compared with 71% of college graduates, 62% of people with "some college" experience and just 52% of people who never attended college.

e) In concluding their article, the authors wrote, "Our study shows that many people think they are smarter than they really are, but they may not be stupid to think so. " What do you think? To what extent does this study's results support this conclusion? 

e) Ask a question about this study's construct, internal, external, and statistical validity. 

Posted at 05:01 PM in Chapter 03; Three Claims, Four Validities , Chapter 05; Identifying Good Measurement | Permalink

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3 Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder

Dialing up reflection to boost learning, growth, and strategic contributions..

Posted August 1, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

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• By recalibrating our thinking:doing ratio, we can be intentional about how and where we invest our resources.
• Reflection helps us see the big picture and how we and our work fit into the overall scope.
• Prioritizing, preparing, and improvising can help us make the best use of our time and resources.

Chelsea, an executive coaching client, came to a session dismayed after receiving feedback from her 360 review that said she needed to work on her “strategic contributions.”

This is not an isolated case. Many executives get hooked into " action bias " or "doing" mode at the expense of carving out time to reflect on whether their actions and approaches are taking them where they want to go.

In my role as a coach, I’ve noticed that many women leaders (in particular) are intensely overstretched, both at work and at home—so the idea of carving out special time for “slow, effortful, and deliberate” reflection feels counterintuitive. Yet, while getting things done is important for leaders, reflection is vital for visioning, strategizing, innovation , learning, impact, and advancement.

Here are three ways to expand your learning, leverage your action, and enhance your success strategy to achieve the results you want for your team and your career .

1. Rework Your Ratio

Nancy Kline reminds us: “The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first.” Your contributions are determined not only by your actions but also by the quality of your strategic insights. This means ensuring that you spend enough time thinking about how to connect knowledge and experiences in new ways, unpack complex challenges, build shared understanding, and find innovative solutions.

Chelsea strongly adhered to an unhelpful dichotomy that prioritized "doing" over "thinking." We needed to reframe reflection as an important leadership competency, underpinning key tasks such as visioning, innovation, relationship-building, and execution. These are equally important for developing and leveraging your networks and visibility, as part of managing your career and having more impact. For Chelsea, this meant setting an intention to be more mindful about cultivating and presenting strategic contributions and scheduling time before a meeting, so that she did not “literally run into the meeting out of breath.”

For yourself, think about the following:

• What is my current thinking:doing ratio?
• How does this support me to work smarter, not harder?
• What would it mean for my visioning, innovation, strategic contributions, and career if I increased my reflection time by 10 percent?
• What is the cost to me/my team if I don’t prioritize time to reflect?

Reflection helps you see, even create, the big picture, and how you and your work shape and fit into the overall scope. It also invites you to reflect on how you want to show up as a leader and intentionally choose activities that will advance and make visible the work that you’re doing.

2. Prioritize, Prepare, and Improvise

When I first started coaching with Chelsea, she shared her belief that “thinking isn’t real work.” There were a number of assumptions to unpack here, beginning with what it means to add value as a leader.

One reason why many women leaders fall into constant doing/delivery mode is stereotype threat: the fear that if they don’t do everything possible—and do it better than everyone else, including male leaders—they will be perceived as less competent and less valuable. This often manifests in “over-efforting,” or endless proving themselves—which all but ensures there is no time for strategizing or reflection. Ironically, it can also lead to women investing most of their resources in work that’s less strategic, less visible, and less impactful for their leadership.

Correcting course requires that leaders prioritize reflection as a strategic practice and actively carve out space to do this work. For Chelsea, this meant owning her goal of moving into a bigger role and exploring how to be seen as providing more strategic contributions. We reviewed how she could prioritize high-level strategy meetings to leverage her experience as a guest editor for an industry journal sharing nonproprietary industry trends and insights. To make the most of this, Chelsea would need to identify how this intelligence added to the conversation in her company.

• What meetings and events are important for my work and where I want to go? Which events can I delegate to others?
• What kind of contribution is important to make—for the organization, for my work, and my career?
• How do I want to show up at these events?
• What do I want/need to plan, and what can I improvise? What do I need to prepare in advance to make this happen?

Chelsea’s desire to lead bigger, coupled with her already charged agenda, meant that she had to redefine her relationship to prioritizing, preparing, and improvising to make the best use of her time and resources.

3. Make It a Practice

Try scheduling 10 to 30 minutes a day into your calendar for intentional, innovative brainwork and thoughtful reflection. If this feels like too much to start with, begin with 10 to 30 minutes a week.

If this is new to you, give yourself some written prompts. For example, add some words or phrases in your calendar entry to pinpoint a few specific things you want to think more about or reflect on, such as “Yesterday’s exchange with Mark / Imposter syndrome at VP meeting / How to be more visible in meetings.” Another approach is to use a meeting, encounter, or even your entire week in review, as cognitive fodder. What went well? What would you like to do differently? What did you learn?

• Leave any canceled meetings on your calendar—and use that time as reflection time.
• For every three meetings you schedule with others, schedule 30 minutes for yourself to reflect.
• Once you’ve made this a dependable habit, expand your reflection to include company-wide issues, such as vision, strategy, and/or trends.

Without reflection, it's very difficult to set a direction, be strategic, or innovate. It’s also hard to learn and grow, lead, and manage our careers.

By recalibrating our thinking:doing ratio, we can be intentional about how and where we invest our resources. We thereby create opportunity, leverage our learning, and expand our leadership and success strategy so we are working smarter, not harder.

Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony. The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision… Harvard Business Review. June 2011.

Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris. Why Women Feel More Stress at Work. Harvard Business Review. August 4, 2016.

WorkLife with Adam Grant. Breaking free of stereotype threat with Claude Steele. Apple Podcasts.

Palena Neale, Ph.D. , is a women’s leadership coach, lecturer, and founder of unabridged, a boutique leadership development practice.

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How Can Robert Downey, Jr. Be Doctor Doom? The Shared History Between Doom and Iron Man Explained

Doctor doom is iron man now it makes more sense than you might think..

This year’s Marvel Studios panel at San Diego Comic-Con may not have been overflowing with new reveals and announcements, but there was one huge shocker to cap off the evening. We learned that Avengers 5 has now become Avengers: Doomsday , and none other than Robert Downey, Jr. has been cast as iconic Marvel villain Doctor Doom.

Marvel fans are still trying to wrap their heads around that announcement . It’s a big deal that arguably Marvel’s biggest and most important villain is finally going to make his MCU debut. But why is he being played by Downey of all people? Is Doom an evil variant of Tony Stark?

We have a lot more questions than answers at this point. But it’s important to remember one thing - Iron Man and Doctor Doom have a long history together in Marvel’s comic book universe. We can only assume this casting will play on that history one way or another. As we grapple with this surprise announcement, let’s break down the relationship between Doom and Iron Man in the comics and how that might play into the MCU’s unusual take on Doctor Doom.

Was Robert Downey Jr being cast as Doctor Doom the right move for the MCU?

Iron Man and Doctor Doom’s Shared History

Doctor Doom will always be defined by his feud with Mister Fantastic. As the traditional origin story goes, Reed Richards and Victor von Doom were college roommates and intellectual rivals from pretty much the very beginning. Victor was obsessed with building a machine that would allow him to communicate with his dead mother. Reed warned his frenemy that the machine was dangerous, but the arrogant Victor didn’t listen. That stubbornness wound up blowing up in his face - literally - when the machine exploded and scarred Victor’s handsome mug. One soul-searching journey around the world later, Victor von Doom was reborn as Doctor Doom.

Mister Fantastic has certainly remained Doom’s arch-enemy over the years, but the Latverian monarch has also tussled with Iron Man a fair few times. Their rivalry really took shape in a 1981 storyline called Doomquest, where both Tony Stark and Victor von Doom are dragged back in time to the court of King Arthur. Doom attempts to forge an alliance with Morgan le Fay, but they’re no match for the combined might of Iron Man and King Arthur’s knights.

Doom and Iron Man had another major faceoff in 2007’s Mighty Avengers, which is set in the aftermath of the Civil War crossover and Tony Stark’s promotion to Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. After Doom is implicated in an attack on New York City, Iron Man leads the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. in an all-out invasion of Doom’s kingdom of Latveria. Though Doom wasn’t actually responsible for the attack, he winds up in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody.

Basically, as one of the only people on the planet smart enough to rival Victor von Doom himself, Tony was always going to wind up on Doom’s s*** list. It’s the same reason Doom and T’Challa have always had such a love/hate relationship. It doesn’t help that Tony is purely a man of science, whereas Doom is all too happy to tap into the power of the supernatural in his never-ending quest for more power. That conflict between technology and magic is what has also made The Mandarin such an enduring Iron Man foe.

But their relationship isn’t always purely antagonistic. Following the events of 2015’s Secret Wars (which ends with Doom being redeemed and getting his old face back), Doom turns over a new leaf. He becomes a supporting character in 2015’s Invincible Iron Man, insisting on lending a helping hand despite Tony refusing to believe that the former Doctor Doom is on the level.

Doom even becomes the new Iron Man for a time after Tony is left in a comatose state due to the events of 2016’s Civil War II. That’s the premise of a series called Infamous Iron Man , as Doom forges his own suit of Iron Man armor and attempts to carry on Tony’s heroic legacy. Doom even defends Stark Industries from an attack by The Hood and his minions, but at the cost of his recently healed face.

It’s also worth pointing out that there are versions of Doctor Doom in the Marvel multiverse who actually are Tony Stark. One of these is Iron Maniac, a version of Tony Stark introduced in 2004's Marvel Team-Up #3. Another is featured in 2010’s What If? Iron Man: Demon in an Armor #1. In this world, Victor von Doom swapped bodies with Tony Stark in college. Trapped in his rival’s body Tony swears revenge and begins a yearslong quest to destroy Doom’s Stark Universal company.

How Can Robert Downey, Jr. Be Playing Doctor Doom?

At this point, we’ve established that Doctor Doom and Iron Man have a long shared history together in the comics. But that still doesn’t answer the basic question - why is Downey of all people playing Doctor Doom? Why cast the actor who made Iron Man a household name as a completely different Marvel character now?

One possibility is that Downey is simply playing a new MCU role, independent of any connection to Tony Stark. Don’t forget that Doom is well-known for never taking off his mask. Whether because he can't or simply won't is part of his mystique. Depending on how over-the-top Downey’s performance is (and there’s plenty of room to go big with a character like Doom), the movies may simply be able to ignore the fact that the guy underneath Doom’s armor looks and sounds an awful lot like Tony Stark. If Downey proved anything with his performances in 1992’s Chaplin and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies, it’s that he can really transform himself with the right accent.

And it’s not as if Downey would be the first MCU actor to return in a completely different role. Michelle Yeoh played Aleta Olgord in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Ying Nan in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. David Dastmalchian played Kurt Goreshter in the first two Ant-Man movies and pivoted to playing Veb in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Gemma Chan played Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel and Sersi in Eternals. There is a precedent for this kind of double-casting.

That said, it seems hard to imagine that Marvel just decided to cast Downey again without intending to reference his history as Tony Stark. Another option is that Doom has been reimagined as a variant of Tony Stark. We know that the newly retitled The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set in an alternate-universe, retro-futuristic version of New York City. Perhaps in this universe, Tony Stark is the one who rooms with Reed Richards in college and develops an unhealthy obsession with besting his rival.

This Tony may undergo some twisted inversion of the origin story seen in 2008’s Iron Man, leaving him disfigured and retreating inside a powerful suit of armor to plot vengeance against the Richards family. Doom may not be the primary antagonist in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (that would be Ralph Ineson’s Galactus ), but we have to imagine he’ll appear in the movie in some capacity. Ideally, the FF movie will provide Downey’s new character with an origin story prior to him taking center stage in Avengers: Doomsday.

We also know that the FF are eventually making the jump to the MCU, as they’re now confirmed to be appearing in both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. It’s probably safe to assume that Doom will make the journey with them. Making Doom a refugee from another world would also help explain why the character has yet to appear in any previous MCU project. Like with the FF, the MCU has no Doctor Doom of its own. The Fantastic Four: First Steps can change that.

Whether Downey’s Doom is Victor von Doom or Tony Stark, it may not matter much in the end. This is a villain who’s egomaniacal to an extreme. He hides from the world inside a suit of armor. He combines the most advanced technology his mind can conjure and the darkest spells the supernatural realm has to offer to make himself a god among men. He’s a twisted inversion of everything Iron Man stands for. Where Iron Man was the savior of the MCU, Doom is its greatest nightmare.

That’s why you cast Robert Downey, Jr. as Doctor Doom. It’s a chance for the MCU’s most pivotal actor to play a completely different kind of character, but one who can have an equally profound effect on the future of this universe. We’ve seen Downey at his heroic best. Now it’s time to see just how evil he can be.

Deadpool & Wolverine: Easter Eggs, Cameos and References

For more on Marvel's SDCC panel, learn what we saw in the Captain America: Brave New World footage and the stunt-heavy Thunderbolts* footage .

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter .

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