| Abstract: I will give a talk version of the book chapter I wrote this summer about student learning from online mathematics homework. The literature about online homework suggests the following: 1. Instructors' attitudes influence students' attitudes. 2. Online homework has the same effects on student achievement, or increases achievement slightly, as compared to paper-and-pencil homework. 3. Students complete online homework at higher rates than they complete paper-and-pencil homework. 4. Students like having both online and paper-and-pencil homework, and aspects of both may be important for student success. 5. If employing both online and paper-and-pencil homework, be wary of the total workload. 6. Be intentional about due dates, particularly if employing both online and written homework components. 7. Students become rapidly frustrated with online homework platforms that make it difficult to format answers, or are inconsistent in answer formatting. 8. Students do more homework when it counts toward their course grade. 9. Offering unlimited attempts per problem is linked to student persistence in repeating assignments/problems to obtain high scores. It may also increase students' confidence in their ability to do math. 10. Offering unlimited/multiple attempts is linked both to students employing those attempts to make sense of the mathematics, and in employing those attempts to guess answers. 11. When students can submit each part of a question individually, they often employ feedback on one part to guide their work on the other parts of the question.
12. Students like "help" features. We do not know much about how they employ these tools. 13. Content is incredibly, incredibly important. I will discuss the research that supports these conclusions, and give an overview of a paper I'm working on about the nature of students' activity as they complete online homework. |