Full Length Article
Is doing your homework associated with becoming more conscientious?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.08.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • More effort in students’ homework is associated with a more positive development in conscientiousness.

  • Effects remain stable after controlling for differences between students increasing and decreasing their homework effort.

  • Associations are found for self-reported and parent-reported personality.

Abstract

Research has shown that sustained homework effort enhances academic performance and that students’ conscientiousness is a powerful predictor of students’ homework effort. But does homework—as homework proponents claim—in turn also influence the development of conscientiousness over time? In the present study, we examined whether students’ homework effort in two subjects (i.e., mathematics and German) was associated with inter-individual differences in students’ development of conscientiousness in the early years of adolescence. Bivariate change models with a total of N = 2760 students revealed that homework effort and conscientiousness were systematically related over time (Grade 5 to Grade 8). Most importantly, students who invested more effort in their homework showed more positive development in conscientiousness.

Introduction

Conscientiousness refers to a family of related personality traits that include the qualities of having self-control and being responsible to others, hardworking, orderly, and rule abiding (Roberts, Lejuez, Krueger, Richards, & Hill, 2014). Conscientiousness appears to be one of the most influential trait domains, as it predicts physical health (Hampson et al., 2007, Moffitt et al., 2011), the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (Wilson, Schneider, Arnold, Bienias, & Bennett, 2007), and longevity (Kern & Friedman, 2008). Conscientiousness also predicts outcomes such as relationship quality, the duration of relationships, and occupational attainment (Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). And, in the case of school, conscientiousness is the most important factor aside from cognitive abilities when it comes to school performance (Poropat, 2009). Succinctly, conscientiousness is a personality trait that promotes better health, wealth, relationships, and school success.

Given the importance of conscientiousness, it is becoming increasingly common for institutions and the public to want to understand how to foster it (Roberts et al., 2014). Conscientiousness falls into the category of “non-cognitive” factors that are now acknowledged as complementary to but just as important as cognitive ability in determining human capital outcomes, such as educational attainment and occupational success (Almlund, Duckworth, Heckman, & Kautz, 2011). Accordingly, most parents and societies are invested in having their children become adults who are responsible, hardworking, and have appropriate self-control.

It is often assumed that childhood is the right time to develop conscientiousness (Heckman, 2012), and that school provides an ideal environment to foster conscientiousness and its constituent elements, such as industriousness or grit. Homework is one of the most widely used practices through which children are seen as learning the lesson that hard work pays off (e.g., Cooper et al., 2006, Epstein and Van Voorhis, 2001, Trautwein et al., 2009). Presumably, then, homework should be one mechanism through which children learn to be more conscientious. Despite the intrinsic connection between homework and conscientiousness, to our knowledge there has never been a longitudinal study of children in which changes in the two constructs have been tracked simultaneously over time. In the current study, we report data from a four-wave longitudinal study where both students’ homework effort and conscientiousness were assessed. Moreover, in addition to the typical self-report assessment of conscientiousness, our study also contains parent ratings of conscientiousness, allowing us to test not only whether self-perceptions of conscientiousness change, but also whether outside observers note the changes related to increases in homework effort.

In most countries around the world, students spend a substantial amount of time working on homework in subjects like mathematics or language. Typically, more homework is assigned in higher grades than in lower grades, and several literature reviews suggest that homework is associated with achievement gains. For instance, a highly influential meta-analysis by Cooper et al. (2006) summarized a variety of studies and provided empirical support for homework effects on students’ achievement. Similar results were found in a more recent meta-analysis (Fan, Xu, Cai, He, & Fan, 2017) and a study by Falch and Rønning (2012), which found that homework effects are largely consistent across data from 16 OECD countries, even though cross-country differences do exist (see also Dettmers, Trautwein, & Lüdtke, 2009).

There are three things to be aware of when considering students’ homework. First, the “active ingredient” in homework that drives achievement is homework effort as indicated by active and engaged homework behavior, as opposed to just time spent doing homework (Flunger et al., 2015). A number of empirical studies have shown that homework effort is consistently related to student achievement, whereas findings on the relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement are more mixed (e.g., Cooper et al., 2006). Regarding the latter, there are some studies showing a positive relation, whereas other studies report null or even small negative effects. The negative effects likely result from the negative link between prior knowledge and time spent on homework, as the time students reportedly spent on homework is “strongly influenced by their prior knowledge” (De Jong, Westerhof, & Creemers, 2000). Second, there is a set of student characteristics that are seen as key determinants of students’ homework effort. In particular, students’ conscientiousness and related constructs such as self-control, persistence, and achievement goals have emerged as potential predictors of homework effort and therefore higher achievement in terms of test scores or grades (e.g., Duckworth and Seligman, 2005, Elliot et al., 1999, Galla and Duckworth, 2015, Trautwein et al., 2006). Consistent with the results on student achievement, it is homework effort rather than time spent on homework that is predicted by students’ conscientiousness. For instance, Trautwein and Lüdtke (2007) reported a medium-sized statistically significant relation between conscientiousness and homework effort, but non-statistically significant results for the relation between conscientiousness and time spent on homework. Moreover, conscientiousness has been shown to be particularly important for students’ effort in the homework situation, as differences in effort between more and less conscientious students have been found to be more profound in homework as opposed to classwork. Finally, doing homework is not only relevant for students’ achievement but is also considered relevant for non-academic outcomes. Epstein and Van Voorhis (2001) identified a variety of non-academic reasons for why teachers assign homework, including ensuring that everyone participates in learning, promoting parental homework involvement, and developing good personal habits among students. Personal development is achieved by creating situations where students must utilize good time management skills in order to get their work done. Students have to control the amount of time they spend on different tasks, establish work schedules, build study skills (Muhlenbruck, Cooper, Nye, & Lindsay, 2000), and learn to deal with distractions at home (Cooper et al., 2000, Trautwein et al., 2009, Trautwein et al., 2009, Xu and Corno, 1998). This is particularly true in the elementary grades, as teachers are trying to prepare children for the more rigorous assignments that will come later in schooling (Muhlenbruck et al., 2000). Even though all of these educational studies have provided highly relevant findings for the trait of conscientiousness, no study exists that tests the relation between students’ homework effort and changes in conscientiousness.

An increasing number of studies show that conscientiousness changes during late childhood and early adolescence, although this change does not necessarily follow a linear time trend and diverges from well-known consistent change patterns at older ages (e.g., early adulthood; Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). Research has shown that children’s self-control increases as they move through their preschool and elementary school years, but sometimes decreases again during the transition to adolescence (e.g., Luan et al., 2017, Soto and Tackett, 2015, Tackett and Durbin, 2017). Denissen, van Aken, Penke, and Wood (2013) highlight the importance of regulative processes for understanding personality development at this age. They argue that regulative strategies need resources and practice, which might be a potential explanation for temporary dips in some aspects of personality maturity. At the same time, however, individual differences in personality traits become more pronounced over childhood and adolescence. Alongside age-related developmental processes, children and young adolescents experience divergent relationships with their social environment, which lead to more pronounced inter-individual differences. For example, youths who spend less time closely supervised by parents have access to quite different learning contexts and gain greater independence in their everyday lives (Caspi et al., 2005, Roberts et al., 2008). That is, personality changes quite a lot during childhood and adolescence (Donnellan, Hill, & Roberts, 2015), but not in a systematic way. The years from childhood to young adulthood show higher personality instability compared to other parts of the lifespan, suggesting that personality has a high level of plasticity during this period (Soto & Tackett, 2015).

The idea that students’ homework effort can lead to long-lasting changes in students’ conscientiousness is guided by recent integrative models of personality traits and personality trait change (Roberts, 2009, Wrzus and Roberts, 2017). The first theoretical perspective on why changes in homework effort may lead to enduring changes in conscientiousness is the sociogenomic model of personality traits (Roberts & Jackson, 2008). According to the sociogenomic model, long-term shifts in states are one of the hypothesized conduits for personality trait change. With regard to the homework-conscientiousness relation, accommodating teachers’ demands by studying harder would shift states related to conscientiousness. If these changes in conscientiousness-related states become extended, internalized, and automatic, they can cause changes in conscientiousness in a bottom-up fashion (Magidson et al., 2014, Roberts, 2006). Recent support for the idea that studying might lead to change in a bottom-up fashion comes from a short-term longitudinal study of German high school students, whose conscientiousness increased proportionate to the amount of effort they put into studying for their secondary school graduation examination (Bleidorn, 2012).

This assumption is also in line with the TESSERA framework, which explicitly addresses the theoretical integration of the short-term processes that underlie personality development (Wrzus & Roberts, 2017). The TESSERA framework posits that long-term personality development occurs as a result of repeated short-term situational processes, which can be described as a sequence of Triggering situations, Expectancy, States/State Expressions, and Reactions (TESSERA). Repeatedly experiencing TESSERA sequences can lead to long-term personality development. In the case of homework, teachers assigning homework at the end of one lesson presumably triggers students’ expectancy of how well the homework needs to be done, which in turn results in momentary thoughts (e.g., surface or deep processing of homework), feelings (curiosity or boredom), and behaviors (e.g., perseverant or non-persistent) while completing the homework at home (states/state expressions). Reactions after homework come from the students themselves (e.g., pride at one’s achievement) or from the teacher the next day (e.g., feedback), and these then determine whether the way the students did their homework needs to be changed or can remain unchanged. Repeatedly experiencing the need to change one’s homework effort can then lead to long-lasting changes in personality traits such as conscientiousness, of which self-control, planning, and effort are key components. Thereby, one further assumption of the TESSERA model is that individual differences exist in the sequence from behavior to personality trait change. That is, the connection between triggering situations and state expressions is not an automatic response to specific situations, it is also shaped by internal (e.g., students’ attributed value) and external sources (e.g., expectations of relevant others; e.g., parents). This explains why even when confronted with high-quality learning assignments not all students will change their personality in the same direction and to the same extent.

In sum, student homework effort might be one potential source of change in conscientiousness. However, not all kinds of behaviors are associated with longstanding changes in broad personality domains. Only trans-situationally consistent and trait corresponsive experiences/behaviors can lead to changes at the level of broad personality factors (Roberts et al., 2008). Given this strong theoretical basis for trait change in personality research, there is surprisingly little work on relating behavioral changes to personality trait changes. The present study set out to test the relation between students’ homework effort and changes in students’ conscientiousness. Specifically, by following a sample of German students throughout the first years of secondary education, this study provided a fine-grained investigation of the dynamic interplay between students’ homework effort and changes in conscientiousness.

Section snippets

The present study

Although homework is a widely used technique to help students build upon skills that were taught in the classroom, relatively little is known about the relation between educational experiences such as homework and personality trait change over time. In the present study, we were interested whether students’ homework effort after the transition from primary to secondary school is associated with changes in the trait of conscientiousness. Our study design is unique in several ways, but most

Participants

Participants were drawn from the Tradition and Innovation in School Systems Study (TRAIN; Jonkmann, Rose, & Trautwein, 2013), a large-scale study which was designed to analyze the academic development of students in different school tracks in two German states (Saxony and Baden-Württemberg). Students were initially assessed right after their transition from primary to secondary school in Grade 5, when students are faced with new and demanding environments in which pre-existing behavior is less

Students’ conscientiousness and homework effort

Our first research question concerned the basic form of change found for both homework effort and conscientiousness. For this, we took the final measurement invariance models (descriptive results are shown in Table 2) and applied a change score model (Fig. 1 left). We standardized all mean-level change scores based on standard deviations at Grade 5, meaning that age trends are shown on the scale of standard deviations at the first measurement time point. That is, time effects are presented in

Discussion

The main goal of the present study was to test whether doing homework was associated with a positive development in young people’s conscientiousness over time. We addressed this question by examining changes in students’ homework effort and conscientiousness over a three-year period during the early years of adolescence and after the transition from primary to secondary school. Using a large-scale longitudinal data set from Germany, we obtained empirical support that students’ homework effort

Conclusion

This research provides evidence that students’ homework effort can lead to increases in the trait of conscientiousness. Although prior research has confirmed that conscientiousness is an important predictor of students’ homework effort, the idea that doing homework can also be an important vehicle through which children become more conscientious has received less attention. Coupled with the fact that homework is one of the most widely used educational practices, the present study suggests that

References (61)

  • J.B. Billiet et al.

    Modeling acquiescence in measurement models for two balanced sets of items

    Structural Equation Modeling

    (2000)
  • W. Bleidorn

    Hitting the road to adulthood: Short-term personality development during a major life transition

    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

    (2012)
  • A. Caspi et al.

    Personality development: Stability and change

    Annual Review of Psychology

    (2005)
  • H. Cooper et al.

    Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003

    Review of Educational Research

    (2006)
  • R. De Jong et al.

    Homework and student math achievement in junior high schools

    Educational Research and Evaluation

    (2000)
  • J.A. Denissen et al.

    Self-regulation underlies temperament and personality: An integrative developmental framework

    Child Development Perspectives

    (2013)
  • S. Dettmers et al.

    The relationship between homework time and achievement is not universal: Evidence from multilevel analyses in 40 countries

    School Effectiveness and School Improvement

    (2009)
  • S. Dettmers et al.

    Homework works if homework quality is high: Using multilevel modeling to predict the development of achievement in mathematics

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (2010)
  • M.B. Donnellan et al.

    Personality development across the life span: Current findings and future directions

  • A.L. Duckworth et al.

    Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents

    Psychological Science

    (2005)
  • A.J. Elliot et al.

    Achievement goals, study strategies, and exam performance: A mediational analysis

    Journal of Educational Psychology

    (1999)
  • C.K. Enders

    Applied missing data analysis

    (2010)
  • J.L. Epstein et al.

    More than minutes: Teachers' roles in designing homework

    Educational Psychologist

    (2001)
  • T. Falch et al.

    Homework assignment and student achievement in OECD countries

    (2012)
  • B.M. Galla et al.

    More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes

    Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

    (2015)
  • R. Göllner et al.

    Whose “storm and stress” is it? Parent and child reports of personality development in the transition to early adolescence

    Journal of Personality

    (2017)
  • S.E. Hampson et al.

    Mechanisms by which childhood personality traits influence adult health status: Educational attainment and healthy behaviors

    Health Psychology

    (2007)
  • J.J. Heckman

    The case for investing in young children

  • K.A. Heller et al.

    KFT 4-12+R Kognitiver Fähigkeitstest für 4. bis 12. Klassen, Revision – Manual [KFT 4-12+R Cognitive Abilities Test for Grades 4 to 12]

    (2000)
  • R. Hogan et al.

    A socioanalytic perspective on job performance

    Human Performance

    (1998)
  • Cited by (0)

    The research reported here is based upon work supported by the Postdoc Academy of the Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology, funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts, and the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network, which is funded within the framework of the Excellence Initiative by the German State and Federal Governments (GSC 1028). Involvement of Brent W. Roberts in the preparation of this paper was made possible by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts, Germany. Richard Göllner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the International PATHWAYS to Adulthood Programme.

    View full text