Similar to the affects of year-round schooling, having homework assignments to complete over holiday breaks will help students to advance in their schooling and better their understanding of the material.
To most students, homework over the break sounds like a nightmare; you want to be able to enjoy your break, but you can’t relax with a ton of work that you need to get done.
Well, maybe having a bit of work to do is beneficial for their stress levels and performance in school.
It sounds bad, but listen to the evidence before you write off the idea completely.
According to a study done by Elon University, students who attended year-round schools tend to have better grades than those who attend standard school.
This research can be applied to the notion of assigning homework during breaks. The reason why year-round school has shown to be more beneficial than a standard school year is because students have shorter gaps between learning material, helping them retain it easier.
The idea of assigning work to be done over a break does the same thing for the student.
Since a standard school year’s break would be long, having the review during the time off makes up for the gap in the school year.
In today’s modern age, it seems that more and more kids feel the pressure to take on honors and AP courses. It’s great that students want to push themselves, but these classes also come with a lot of dense material and it can be hard to keep up.
If they then get a week-and-a-half off from school, they can risk forgetting a lot of the content presented in these fast-paced classes.
One could argue that with how stressful these courses can be, students need time off to relax and forget about them for a while. I, however, believe this could create even more stress for them.
There’s nothing more stressful than coming to the end of your break and seeing a Schoology update that your chapter 12 test is next week and you realize that you can’t even remember what you were taught in chapter 12.
The other thing to be considered is how much work is being assigned. When students hear that they have to do schoolwork over break, they may think of having entire days worth of work to be done. That amount of work would be as harmful has not having any review at all.
While a teacher shouldn’t assign overwhelming amounts of homework to their students, they shouldn’t feel the need to shy away from assigning any work at all. The trick would be to find a comfortable middle-ground.
Something like a short packet, no more than one page for every two days the student is on break, would be ideal. This would be a manageable amount for them to get done, while still being able to take advantage of their time off and be with their families during the holidays.
Overall, teachers should take a moment to hear these benefits and consider assigning a little bit of work to keep the content fresh in their students minds over a holiday break.