The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course

TL;DR

This study investigates how homework completion affects exam performance among students with varying physics aptitudes, revealing positive effects for high-aptitude students and negative correlations for low-aptitude students, possibly due to cognitive overload or concept integration issues.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how student aptitude influences the effectiveness of homework in physics education, highlighting the need for tailored instructional strategies.

Findings

High-aptitude students benefit from homework with better exam scores.

Low-aptitude students show negative correlation between homework and exam performance.

Homework copying was not a factor affecting the results.

Abstract

We examine the relationship between homework completion and exam performance for students having different physics aptitudes for five different semesters of an introductory electricity and magnetism course. In our analysis, we plot exam scores versus homework completion scores and calculate the slopes of the line fits and the Pearson correlations. On average, completing many homework problems correlated to better exam scores only for students with high physics aptitude. Low aptitude physics students had a negative correlation between exam performance and completing homework; the more homework problems they did, the worse their performance was on exams. One explanation for this effect is that the assigned homework problems placed an excessive cognitive load on low aptitude students. As a result, no learning or even negative learning might have taken place when low aptitude students attempted to do assigned homework. Another explanation is based on the fact that the negative benefit effects first appeared when magnetism concepts were introduced. According to this explanation, low aptitude students had difficulty consolidating knowledge of magnetic fields with previously-learned knowledge of electric fields. A third possibility, that a high homework copying rate by low aptitude students impeded learning, is rejected because two different analyses revealed no evidence of homework copying.