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Do you agree that homework is an effective way to increase education and achievement levels, or do you think homework is ineffective?

Or somewhere in between?

Discuss. Debate. Cite your sources. Follow the rules. Be Nice. Whatever else you are supposed to say here...

Homework, just as most everything that might originally be good in life, becomes anti-productive in excess. While I do find that teachers need to reinforce their ideas upon students again for the ideas to fully settle in their brains, and to be able to see what each student is thinking individually, the tendency for homework to become gruntwork instead of a reinforcement makes it ineffective sometimes. After all, in math, for example: if a student gets fifty difficult questions that basically use the same concept over and over again, it becomes a time-waster. The student will start looking for shortcuts so that they will finish more quickly, and then the learning will not be focused on the actual lesson, but on how to skip most of the work. However, ten difficult questions (or less, depending just how difficult they are) would keep the brain thinking along the right lines and serve the original purpose the homework was there for.

So, yes and no. I suppose it isn't homework in general, but how the teacher assigns homework, that makes it effective or ineffective.

A comprehensive review of academic performance around the world gives bad marks to excessive homework.

Teachers in Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark assign relatively little homework, yet students there score well, researchers said this week.

"At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average scores -- Thailand, Greece, Iran -- have teachers who assign a great deal of homework," says Penn State researcher David Baker.

Nice. I had this topic for English class just recently, I thought it was interesting we spend a whole class period debating. We got pretty far into the issue. And it was way fun. I wish we did stuff like that more often. Where the teacher doesn't just stand in the front of the room and read out of a book and tell you to take notes, but you are actively participating and discussing semi-interesting things. He didn't want us to go into topics that were highly controversial. Haha, he was afraid we might get out of hand.

I was special, I played both sides of it.

Homework helps. But at the same time too much can be extremely bad. And since there is no SET guidelines, and how long it takes a person on their homework depends on how well they understand the topic. So. I just think, we should work harder during classes where we have the teacher to correct us when we are doing it wrong, rather than go home, do the packet, find out you did it wrong, and have to do 7x the amount of work, to make up for doing it wrong(if you do something wrong you have to do it 7x correctly to make up for doing it one time wrong, such as multiplication ect.)

Homework re-enforces what you have already learned. I think a lot of the good or bad comes out of the students opinion of homework. ex. If the student hates homework and finds shortcuts, the homework will not help them. However, in college homework is rarely assigned and people have to learn to do their own studying. Homework can be really nice if you look at it that way.

It works if you do it. Without home work we would have to spend hours more in school to learn the same amount.

Homework is a good thing in way. I just wish they didn't give so much.
Or at least not take it for a grade. In my math class eversince they only took it for a completion, my grade went up and I stressed out less.