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The Benefits Of Homework: 10 Suggestions From Experts

Almost everyone hates homework. From the time you’re in primary school, to the time you’re working on your college degree, you have to commit a significant amount of your free time to doing work outside of class. It can be unbearably tedious and dull, and it takes up time you could be spending with your friends, or using to engage in hobbies. It’s inescapable until you enter the working world, at which point it’s almost jarring that your work now stays at work.

Homework can be boring and unpleasant, but it’s there for a reason. Educators wouldn’t be assigning some much work out of class unless it served a genuine purpose. You need homework to learn effectively. Unless you’re an unusual prodigy at a particular subject, the time you spend in class isn’t enough to really learn and understand the material. You still need to practice on your own time.

Here are some of the actual benefits of homework, from an educational perspective:

• Class time isn’t enough to learn the material fully. You can only spend so much time in a classroom, and most classes last anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half. You spend a lot of time in class per week, but it’s still not quite enough. Reading your textbook and answering discussion questions or doing math problems, on your own time, helps reinforce the material you were taught in class. If you need to get homework done fast, ask professionals to help you.
• Practice makes perfect. The more you practice, the better you become. Repetitive practice strengthens your long term memory and enhances the learning process, especially for subjects like math that require a lot of rote repetition. Whether you’re solving algebraic equations or answering discussion questions about the Civil War, you’re reinforcing your memory of the material.
• It helps make sure you really know the material. Homework is your instructor’s best measure of how you’re doing in their class. It makes it readily apparent what areas you’re good with, and which areas you struggle in. For a class as a whole, this helps the teacher or professor plan what to teach, so they can make sure that everyone is learning what they need to know.
• Homework builds and strengthens cognitive skills. Believe it or not, doing your homework can actually make you smarter. Whenever you engage in cognition, whether it’s critical thinking about a piece of literature, doing calculus, or working with scientific data, you’re strengthening the neural pathways that encode this information. You’re not just learning material, you’re learning ways of thinking about that material.