THE EFFECTS OF INSTRUCTIONAL HOMEWORK TECHNIQUE ON ELEMENTARY STUDENTS CHEMISTRY UNDERSTANDING

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of instructional homework technique on elementary students' chemistry understanding. The instructional homework technique is a combination of systematic steps that are taken by teachers and students. To apply this technique, science teachers analyze the content that students are going to study in the next class meeting to scientific facts, concepts, and generalizations. Teachers use the results of their analysis to develop a homework assignment for their students. Therefore, students in advance of their science class receive preparation homework assignment. At the begging of each class period, teachers check out the homework assignment and use what students have prepared as part of the classroom teaching strategies such as discussion, problem solving, and lecturing. The sample for this study was 186 grade six students among them 81 male students whom were enrolled in a male school and 105 female students whom were enrolled in a female school. The male students were studying science in 4 classrooms and were taught by one male teacher while female students were studying science in 5 classrooms and were taught by one female teacher. The classrooms in each school were randomly divided into two groups of classes among them five classrooms as experimental groups with total of 104 students (two boys classrooms and three girls classrooms) and four classrooms as control groups with total of 82 students (two classrooms for each gender). Students in the experimental groups have received an instructional homework three times per week while students in the control groups have received regular homework assignments. Teachers did not use the homework outcomes of the control groups as part of any instructional purposes. Teachers in both experimental and control groups used similar teaching strategies. The experiment lasted three weeks and involved six homework assignments and each homework assignment consisted of a minimum of 20 questions. Students in experimental and control groups were taught chemistry topics which are atomic theory, atomic structure, chemical elements, the Periodic Table, metals, the chemical compounds. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), these chemistry topics are considered the formal start to chemistry education in the elementary school curriculum. Moreover, these topics are basics for more advanced chemistry topics especially in higher grades of schooling. The design applied in this study was the pretest posttest control group design and the classroom was used as the unit for statistical analysis. The results showed that there were no significant differences among students in both experimental and control groups in the chemistry pretest achievement measure. However, the results showed that students doing instructional homework did significantly better on a chemistry posttest achievement measure. The partial Eta squared for a post test as dependent variable was .104. Almost both male and female students in the experimental groups achieved equally in the posttest.