Raising a Skeptic

Parents awareness towards students

The degree of parental awareness of children’s preferences for doing homework is promising that many parents are indeed aware of how their children want to do their home­work. However, even if parents understand and are aware of their chil­dren’s pattern of personal preferences for doing homework, they may not make the effort required to match the actual situation in which the child does homework to the child’s preferred conditions. We now turn to the question of whether parents who understand their children’s pref­erences encourage their children to do homework under conditions of their own choosing.  The gap between students’ preferred and actual ways of doing homework indicating that just as many learners do not learn in college according to their individual preferences, many do not do their homework according to their prefer­ences either.

In the Ohayon (1999) study, children characterized by low levels of creative thinking reported differences between the preferred and actual situation in which they did their homework that focused on three, easily remediable dimensions.

They complained that they were provided with less light than they preferred. Moreover, they were not able to move about as they liked and had to remain seated and always in the same place when doing homework. In examining these represen­tative examples of the specific findings of the study, it is striking to conclude that some relatively simple accommodation on the part of par­ents would result in much greater match between the preferred and the actual conditions under which children do their homework.

Learners are not always permitted to learn at home under their pre­ferred conditions.

Parents frequently have strong views about learning conditions and these views may be in contrast to the conditions preferred by the learner. For instance, a child might prefer to study with peers and may actually do better with peer cooperation. The parent, however, might not allow this mode of studying because he or she may feel that studying should be done alone, whereas friends are for socialization. The child might prefer to do his or her homework with background music, but the parent might not allow studying that way because the parent believes music will prevent concentration.

It is important for parents to realize that accommodating home environment to the homework per­formance preferences of children can be a factor in improving the aca­demic achievement level of the homework assignments. Ohayon (1999) computed a score that reflected the discrepancy between the preferred and actual conditions under which the child did his or her homework and found a correlation of -.29 between this gap score and perceived achievement on homework. In other words, the greater the gap, indicat­ing low parent awareness, the lower the achievement. This finding should provide incentive for parents to increase understanding of their child’s homework performance preferences and to accommodate the ac­tual conditions under which homework is done.