27.49
***p < 0.001.
The mean differences of the HCBS between the groups of grades.
To address the gap in the previous research on homework creativity, this study examined the psychometric proprieties of the HCBS and its relationship with academic achievement and general creativity. The main findings were (1) Hypotheses H1a and H1b were supported that the reliability and validity of the HCBS were acceptable; (2) Hypothesis H2 was supported that the correlation between the score of the HCBS and academic achievement was significant ( r -values = 0.23–0.26 for two samples); (3) Hypothesis H3 received support that the correlation between the scores of HCBS and WCAP was significant ( r -values = 0.20–0.29 for two samples); and (4) the H4 was supported from the current data that the score of high school students’ was lower than that of the middle school students’ (Cohen’s d = 0.49).
The first key finding should be noted is that the positive correlations with between pairs of homework creativity, homework completion, and general creativity. This result is inconsistent with prediction of an argument that homework diminishes creativity ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Zheng, 2013 ). Specifically, the correlation between homework completion and curiosity was insignificant ( r = 0.08, p > 0.05) which did not support the argument that homework hurts curiosity of creativity ( Zheng, 2013 ). The possible reason may be homework can provide opportunities to foster some components of creativity by independently finding and developing new ways of understanding what students have learned in class, as Kaiipob (1951) argued. It may be the homework creativity that served as the way to practice the components of general creativity. In fact, the content of items of the HCBS are highly related with creative thinking (refer to Table 2 for details).
The second key finding should be noted is that the score of the HCBS decreased as the level of grades increased from 7 to 11. This is consistent with the basic trend recorded in the previous meta-analyses ( Kim, 2011 ; Said-Metwaly et al., 2021 ). There are three possible explanations leading to this grade effect. The first one is the repetitive exercises in homework. As Zheng (2013) observed, to get higher scores in the highly competitive entrance examination of high school and college, those Chinese students chose to practice a lot of repetitive exercises. The results of some behavior experiments suggested that repetitive activity could reduce the diverse thinking of subjects’ (e.g., Main et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, the repetitive exercises would lead to fast habituation (can be observed by skin conductance records) which hurts the creative thinking of participants ( Martindale et al., 1996 ). The second explanation is that the stress level in Chinese high schools is higher than in middle school because of the college entrance examination. The previous studies (e.g., Beversdorf, 2018 ) indicated that the high level of stress will trigger the increase activity of the noradrenergic system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis which could debase the individual’s performance of creativity. Another likely explanation is the degree of the certainty of the college entrance examination. The level of certainty highly increases (success or failure) when time comes closer to the deadline of the entrance examination. The increase of degree of certainty will lead to the decrease of activity of the brain areas related to curiosity (e.g., Jepma et al., 2012 ).
From the theoretical perspective, there are two points deserving to be emphasized. First, the findings of this study extended the previous work ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). This study revealed that homework creativity had two typical characteristics, including the personal meaning of students (as represented by the content of items of the HCBS) and the small size of “creativity” and limited in the scope of exercises (small correlations with general creativity). These characteristics are in line with what Mini-C described by the previous studies ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). Second, this study deepened our understanding of the relationship between learning (homework is a part of learning) and creativity which has been discussed more than half a century. One of the main viewpoints is learning and creativity share some fundamental similarities, but no one explained what is the content of these “fundamental similarities” (e.g., Gajda et al., 2017 ). This study identified one similarity between learning and creativity in the context of homework, that is homework creativity. Homework creativity has the characteristics of homework and creativity at the same time which served as an inner factor in which homework promote creativity.
The findings in this study also have several potential practical implications. First, homework creativity should be a valuable goal of learning, because homework creativity may make contributions to academic achievement and general creativity simultaneously. They accounted for a total of 10.7% variance of academic achievement and general creativity which are the main goals of learning. Therefore, it is valuable to imbed homework creativity as a goal of learning, especially in the Chinese society ( Zheng, 2013 ).
Second, the items of the HCBS can be used as a vehicle to help students how to develop about homework creativity. Some studies indicated that the creative performance of students will improve just only under the simple requirement of “to be creative please” ( Niu and Sternberg, 2003 ). Similarly, some simple requirements, like “to do your homework in an innovative way,” “don’t stick to what you learned in class,” “to use a simpler method to do your homework,” “to use your imagination when you do homework,” “to design new problems on the basis what learnt,” “to find your own unique insights into your homework,” and “to find multiple solutions to the problem,” which rewritten from the items of the HCBS, can be used in the process of directing homework of students. In fact, these directions are typical behaviors of creative teaching (e.g., Soh, 2000 ); therefore, they are highly possible to be effective.
Third, the HCBS can be used to measure the degree of homework creativity in ordinary teaching or experimental situations. As demonstrated in the previous sections, the reliability and validity of the HCBS were good enough to play such a role. Based on this tool, the educators can collect the data of homework creativity, and make scientific decisions to improve the performance of people’s teaching or learning.
The main contribution is that this study accumulated some empirical knowledge about the relationship among homework creativity, homework completion, academic achievement, and general creativity, as well as the psychometric quality of the HCBS. However, the findings of this study should be treated with cautions because of the following limitations. First, our study did not collect the test–retest reliability of the HCBS. This makes it difficult for us to judge the HCBS’s stability over time. Second, the academic achievement data in our study were recorded by self-reported methods, and the objectivity may be more accurate. Third, the lower reliability coefficients existed in two dimensions employed, i.e., the arrange environment of the HMS (the α coefficient was 0.63), and the adventure of the WCAP (the α coefficient was 0.61). Fourth, the samples included here was not representative enough if we plan to generalize the finding to the population of middle and high school students in main land of China.
In addition to those questions listed as laminations, there are a number of issues deserve further examinations. (1) Can these findings from this study be generalized into other samples, especially into those from other cultures? For instances, can the reliability and validity of the HCBS be supported by the data from other samples? Or can the grade effect of the score of the HCBS be observed in other societies? Or can the correlation pattern among homework creativity, homework completion, and academic achievement be reproduced in other samples? (2) What is the role of homework creativity in the development of general creativity? Through longitudinal study, we can systematically observe the effect of homework creativity on individual’s general creativity, including creative skills, knowledge, and motivation. The micro-generating method ( Kupers et al., 2018 ) may be used to reveal how the homework creativity occurs in the learning process. (3) What factors affect homework creativity? Specifically, what effects do the individual factors (e.g., gender) and environmental factors (such as teaching styles of teachers) play in the development of homework creativity? (4) What training programs can be designed to improve homework creativity? What should these programs content? How about their effect on the development of homework creativity? What should the teachers do, if they want to promote creativity in their work situation? All those questions call for further explorations.
Homework is a complex thing which might have many aspects. Among them, homework creativity was the latest one being named ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Based on the testing of its reliability and validity, this study explored the relationships between homework creativity and academic achievement and general creativity, and its variation among different grade levels. The main findings of this study were (1) the eight-item version of the HCBS has good validity and reliability which can be employed in the further studies; (2) homework creativity had positive correlations with academic achievement and general creativity; (3) compared with homework completion, homework creativity made greater contribution to general creativity, but less to academic achievement; and (4) the score of homework creativity of high school students was lower than that of middle school students. Given that this is the first investigation, to our knowledge, that has systematically tapped into homework creativity, there is a critical need to pursue this line of investigation further.
Ethics statement.
The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the research ethic committee, School of Educational Science, Bohai University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.
HF designed the research, collected the data, and interpreted the results. YM and SG analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. HF, JX, and YM revised the manuscript. YC and HF prepared the HCBS. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
We thank Dr. Liwei Zhang for his supports in collecting data, and Lu Qiao, Dounan Lu, Xiao Zhang for their helps in the process of inputting data.
This work was supported by the LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (grant no. XLYC2007134) and the Funding for Teaching Leader of Bohai University.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923882/full#supplementary-material
“We concluded that this was the right thing for the economy and the people we serve,” the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, said, referring to the central bank’s decision to cut interest rates by half a point.
Jeanna Smialek
Federal reserve cuts interest rates for the first time in four years, jerome h. powell, the fed chair, said that the central bank would take future interest rate cuts “meeting by meeting” after lowering rates by a half percentage point, an unusually large move..
Today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to reduce the degree of policy restraint by lowering our policy interest rate by a half percentage point. Our patient approach over the past year has paid dividends. Inflation is now much closer to our objective, and we have gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent. We’re going to take it meeting by meeting. As I mentioned, there’s no sense that the committee feels it’s in a rush to do this. We made a good, strong start to this, and that’s really, frankly, a sign of our confidence — confidence that inflation is coming down.
The Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday by half a percentage point. Here are some takeaways from the decision and from remarks by the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell.
The Fed’s decision lowers rates to about 4.9 percent, down from a more than two-decade high.
Fed officials lowered interest rates because they are confident that inflation is coming back down to their 2 percent goal, and now they want to prevent the job market from softening further.
Central bankers expect to cut interest rates more in the months to come, but they are not on a preset path, Mr. Powell said. They could speed up if the economy is weak and slow down if it’s strong.
The Fed is keeping a wary eye on the uptick in unemployment, but for now it thinks the economy is basically strong.
The Fed is feeling “growing confidence” that it can pull off the soft economic landing by lowering interest rates.
In short, the Fed has pivoted to its rate cutting era, and there is more to come.
Danielle Kaye
The S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq both closed roughly 0.3 percent lower, a modest drop, after rising earlier in the day on the news of the half-percentage rate cut. Overall, the market doesn’t seem spooked by the larger-than-usual rate cut. Investors had already bet on this bigger move, and the Fed’s messaging – that it wasn’t an emergency cut – also offered reassurance.
Alan Rappeport
Vice President Kamala Harris is out with a statement that makes clear she is not ready to declare “mission accomplished” on inflation. “While this announcement is welcome news for Americans who have borne the brunt of high prices, my focus is on the work ahead to keep bringing prices down,” she said.
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Powell has finished his press conference. We'll be right back with a few big takeaways.
Lydia DePillis
Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, is in the camp that the Fed is making up for not having started to cut in July. “The Fed also doesn’t like to admit policy errors, but some of the decision for a larger cut in September is likely to get caught up as the central bank found itself behind the curve by one meeting,” he wrote in a note. “Therefore, the September decision is a preemptive strike to increase the odds that the central bank can pull off a soft-landing.”
Michelle Bowman, the one committee member who wanted a smaller cut, seemed concerned about a resurgence in inflation as recently as last month. “I still see some upside risks to inflation as supply conditions have now largely normalized and any further improvements to supply seem less likely to offset price pressures arising from increasing geopolitical tensions, additional fiscal stimulus, and increased demand for housing due to immigration,” she said in remarks to the Alaska Bankers Association .
Ben Casselman
The Fed’s last meeting, in July, came just two days before a disappointing jobs report that showed rising unemployment and slowing hiring. Many economists said at the time that the report showed that the Fed should have cut rates — and Powell just suggested he agrees with them. If they had gotten the jobs report before their meeting, he said, “we might well have” cut rates.
One interpretation of today’s half-point cut is that it is making up for the quarter-point cut the Fed didn’t make in July. Powell hasn’t endorsed that interpretation, but he hasn’t exactly rejected it either.
Joe Rennison
Stocks have eased and the S&P 500 is now down for the day.
The real problem when it comes to housing, Powell says, is the lack of supply — a long-term problem that is outside of the Fed’s control.
Powell is asked about housing inflation, which has proved stubborn even as other consumer prices have risen more slowly. He says that the process has been slower than expected, but that data suggests that rents are easing, and that he is confident housing inflation will ultimately cool.
Federal Reserve officials agree that Wednesday’s rate cut is unlikely to be their last. They are much less united on how far or how quickly they will decide to lower rates moving forward.
The chart below, known as the “dot plot,” helps tell the story. Each dot represents one Fed official’s forecast for where interest rates will be at the end of each year.
target rate
projections
Each dot represents what one Fed official thinks the target rate should be at the end of this year and the next.
In 2024, for example, nine of the central bank’s 19 officials expect rates to end the year at about 4.4 percent, half a point below where they stand after the jumbo rate cut on Wednesday. That suggests those officials expect to make more modest, quarter-size cuts in each of the two meetings they have scheduled for the rest of the year.
But seven policymakers expect just one more cut this year, and two officials expect none. At the other end of the spectrum, one official expects the Fed to cut rates by another three-quarters of a point this year, suggesting another supersize reduction in either November or December.
All 19 officials expect rates to be lower at the end of next year than they are now. But their estimates of how much lower vary widely, from about 2.9 percent (two full percentage points below where they are after Wednesday’s action) to 4.1 percent (just three-quarters of a point below where they are now). There is an even wider range of views in 2026 and 2027.
Eventually, most officials expect interest rates to settle between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent. That’s higher than in the decade before the pandemic, when the Fed’s target interest rate never topped 2.5 percent — suggesting we may not soon return to the era of ultralow rates that prevailed after the Great Recession.
Powell tries to make clear that the politics of cutting rates right before a presidential election is not something the Fed thinks about, even though Trump has said any move ahead of November would be political. “This really concentrates the mind,” he said. “We don’t put up any other filters. If you start doing that, I don’t know where you stop.”
Jim Tankersley
No surprise that Powell was asked about the political optics of this decision. And no surprise his answer is, what we care about it doing the best thing for the American people and the economy.
Is the era of ultralow interest rates gone for good? Powell seems to think so. “We’re probably not going back to that era where there are trillions of dollars of sovereign bonds being issued at negative rates,” he said, adding: “My own sense is that we’re not going back to that.”
Powell is asked about whether he would be content if the economy continued to add around 100,000 jobs a month, and he responds that it depends on how many people are entering the labor market. The high rate of immigration in recent years has raised that so-called “breakeven rate,” which is the pace at which employers need to add jobs to prevent the unemployment rate from rising further — some have estimated it’s now about 175,000 jobs a month.
Powell is making very sure to emphasize that the job market is still strong today. He’s walking a tricky line here. There were some concerns coming into this press conference that investors would read a big rate cut today as a sign that the Fed was freaking out about the job market. Powell is pushing back on that with all of this confident talk.
It’s striking how many of the questions in the news conference so far have focused on the job market, rather than inflation. It’s another sign of how the narrative around the economy has shifted.
Talmon Joseph Smith
Powell mentioned that average wage growth for workers is still somewhat above what most officials see as being “consistent with price stability.” One of the things I’ll be watching in the next several months, though, is whether inflation continues to slowly cool even as wage growth remains strong . That may be viewed as a pleasant surprise .
Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, said markets “can and should only celebrate today’s move – and will continue to celebrate over coming months.” The S&P 500 hovered near its record high this afternoon, and the index is now up roughly 0.5 percent as Powell speaks.
Powell notes that layoffs are still low. But as I explained in a story last week , low layoffs don’t necessarily indicate a healthy labor market. It is the rate of hiring, more than the rate of layoffs, that often drives fluctuations in unemployment.
Powell is leaning into the argument that a strong labor market is a good time to cut rates. “There is thinking that the time to support the labor market is when it’s strong, and not when you begin to see the layoffs,” he said, noting that initial claims for unemployment insurance are pretty flat.
Powell acknowledges that the labor market is, by many measures, weaker than it was immediately before the pandemic. But he pushes back against suggestions the labor market is weak, arguing that it is more akin to its state in 2017 or 2018, which was strong, albeit not as strong as on the eve of the pandemic.
Powell notes that plenty of other central banks have already started cutting rates. “We’ve waited, and I think that patience has really paid dividends,” he said.
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A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter. "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a
Bempechat: I can't imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.. Ardizzone: Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you're being listened to—that's such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County.It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she ...
Homework can affect both students' physical and mental health. According to a study by Stanford University, 56 per cent of students considered homework a primary source of stress. Too much homework can result in lack of sleep, headaches, exhaustion and weight loss. Excessive homework can also result in poor eating habits, with families ...
Beyond that point, kids don't absorb much useful information, Cooper says. In fact, too much homework can do more harm than good. Researchers have cited drawbacks, including boredom and burnout toward academic material, less time for family and extracurricular activities, lack of sleep and increased stress.
Pro 1: Homework Helps to Improve Student Achievement. Homework teaches students various beneficial skills that they will carry with them throughout their academic and professional life, from time management and organization to self-motivation and autonomous learning. Homework helps students of all ages build critical study abilities that help ...
Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health ...
Q+A. Does homework still have value? A Johns Hopkins education expert weighs in. Joyce Epstein, co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships, discusses why homework is essential, how to maximize its benefit to learners, and what the 'no-homework' approach gets wrong. The necessity of homework has been a subject of ...
Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning ...
After two hours, however, achievement doesn't improve. For high schoolers, Cooper's research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in ...
Homework or Personal Lives? Many students get home and the first thing they do is homework. They're pressured by their parents to do their homework while simultaneously being encouraged to spend time with family, eat, spend time with friends, go outside, participate in sports or other extracurricular activities, and sleep for 7+ hours. Rather ...
Yet, local school homework policies have been persistently criticized in popular books such as The Myth of Homework: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, (Kohn, 2006). While popular, Kohn's work and that of others, does not cite empirical research to legitimate these claims. LeTendre, professor of
"The data shows that homework over this level is not only not beneficial to children's grades or GPA, but there's really a plethora of evidence that it's detrimental to their attitude ...
Homework has long been a topic of social research, but rela-tively few studies have focused on the teacher's role in the homework process. Most research examines what students do, and whether and ...
A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter. "Our findings on the effects ...
In the study "What Great Homework Looks Like" from the journal Think Differently and Deeply, which connects research in how the brain learns to the instructional practice of teachers, we see moderate advantages of no more than two hours of homework for high school students.For younger students, the correlation is even smaller. Homework does teach other important, non-cognitive skills such as ...
Environmental Factors at Home. Beyond these new scientific findings, several key issues in home life are known to affect a child's educational progress in school. The most common findings from the research literature are summarized in an article entitled "What are the Effects of the Home Environment on Learning?" posted on the Livestrong site:
16% of all children nationwide are living in poverty. Poverty rates are disproportionately high for BIPOC kids. (link is external) - Black (28%), Indigenous (25%), and Latinx (23%) youth are more likely to grow up poor than white (10%) and AAPI (9%) peers. 28% of LGBTQ+ youth report having experienced homelessness or housing instability.
Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health ...
Educators and parents have long been concerned about students stressed by homework loads, but a small research study asked questions recently about homework and anxiety of a different group: parents. The results were unsurprising. While we may have already learned long division and let the Magna Carta fade into memory, parents report that their children's homework causes family stress and ...
Stop blaming your phone. You can decide whether to read and respond to every text as they arrive. Get organized. Work-life balance will not happen without a systematized schedule, a way to capture to-do items, or focus. Maintain priorities and stick to your daily plan (as much as you can). Being home is not being lazy.
Is homework a huge topic for stress and disappointment in your household? Sadly, you're not alone. Too much homework is greatly impacting not only your child's social life, but also your family life as well.
10 ways how Homework affects students social life. 1. Students have less time for social activities. Homework is often a burden for students as they spend less time on their free time activities and spending time with their friends. Regular homework assignments can take students out of the academy or to regions they cannot usually reach.
Introduction. Homework is an important part of the learning and instruction process. Each week, students around the world spend 3-14 hours on homework, with an average of 5 hours a week (Dettmers et al., 2009; OECD, 2014).The results of the previous studies and meta-analysis showed that the homework time is correlated significantly with students' gains on the academic tests (Cooper et al ...
Fed Announces Big Rate Cut "We concluded that this was the right thing for the economy and the people we serve," the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, said, referring to the central bank ...