Mitchell Rabinowitz

Classroom interactions among students and teachers include many activities intended to help students clarify, organize, and remember material. In contrast to classroom learning, learning during homework, for example, may be impoverished. Such learning is generally unsupervised, self-paced, and self-monitored. These characteristics may be disadvantages if the learning activities fail to evoke the effective cognitive events that occur in the supervised learning environment of the classroom....

In this project, the researchers proposed to test specific strategies for structuring homework assignments in ways that would increase the likelihood that students would study productively. From the perspective of cognitive scientists in the early 2000s, the value of homework assignments for improving student learning depends on how the assignments are structured. If the homework can lead a student to have cognitive experiences that common in supervised group-learning environments (such as c...