Most schools provide homework as means of drilling students for additional work. The homework model provides one-size fits all arrangement on the assumption that all learners are equal strength and competence and must do the same questions.
Because math homework is a daily event, they have become a ritual that learners must go through without much attention. Once the work is done and marked, that is the end of that task. The learners rarely engage their brains to remember what was covered in the work.
Usually the homework covers a specific topic that is related to what has just been taught by the teacher. So learners essentially go through routines that were covered earlier in class. This kind of learning promotes rote learning and learners try to build some kind of “reference table” in their heads mapping which routines were used on given day for a given homework.
When students are faced with mathematics problems, they try to remember which method they used in an earlier homework that should be applied. Learners should be able to internalize a problem and address it based on concepts and understanding as opposed to blind application of some routine used in in some homework Homework on the same topic fail to give learners the ability to see patterns in related problems that are unique from other problems. Within the school setting, it is very hard for a teacher to regularly given mixed homework because of the pressure to finish the syllabus, time needed to get every student at the same level, and the criteria to mix the homework will surely be biased.
There is need to give the power to the learners. Engage them to practice questions based on a robust tracking mechanism by keeping tabs on all the topics to be covered. Also there is need to separate concepts from general problem solving to ensure students recall and apply the concepts correctly to problems.
This kind of power can be provided by a good eLearning platform with tools to mix questions and provide detailed solutions to learners.
