Discovery: Students Who Do Homework Get Higher Grades

A proud press release from East Carolina University announces:

Department of Economics professor Dr. Nick Rupp, who counts education tactics among his research interests, recently published the results of a study in which he found that doing homework assignments leads to higher test grades.

“There’s always been anecdotal evidence,” he explained, “but I wanted to explore it scientifically.”

The study is:

“The Role of Homework in Student Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Andrew Grodner and Nicholas G. Rupp [pictured in the university-supplied glamour photo below], Journal of Economic Education, Volume 44, Issue 2, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Thomas Herron for bringing this to our attention.) The researchers, at East Carolina University, report:

“In this article, the authors describe a field experiment in the classroom where principles of micro- economics students are randomly assigned into homework-required and not-required groups. The authors find that homework plays an important role in student learning, especially so for students who initially perform poorly in the course. Students in the homework-required group have higher retention rates, higher test scores (5 to 6 percent), more good grades (Bs), and lower failure rates.”