HOMEWORK MANAGEMENT SCALE: CONFIRMING THE FACTOR STRUCTURE WITH MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS IN CHINA

Individual and class-level factors for students' management of homework environment: The self-regulation perspective

The present study investigated the predictive effects of clusters of variables on homework environment management based on the data from 3018 students in Grade 8. These clusters included: background variables, homework characteristics, adult support and monitoring, homework purposes, goal orientations, and contextual control. At the individual level, management of homework environment was significantly related to at least one variable from each of the six clusters. Specifically, it was associated negatively with time spent watching TV, and positively with prior achievement, homework interest, homework quality, family help, teacher feedback, academic purpose, self-regulatory purpose, mastery-approach, and help seeking. Additionally, males managed homework environment less frequently than females. Finally, management of homework environment was positively related to homework quality at the class level.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-021-02596-5.

Math Homework Purpose Scale

Abstract. The present study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Math Homework Purpose Scale (MHPS). After randomly splitting the sample ( N = 854) into two subsamples ( n = 427 and n = 427), we carried out exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on subsample 1 and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on subsample 2. The Kaiser-Meyer Olkin value of .88 indicated that EFA was appropriate for subsample 1. EFA results showed that a three-factor solution explained 72.2% of the variance. All ten of the MHPS items loaded quite substantially on three factors labeled Academic, Self-Regulatory, and Approval-Seeking. CFA results further showed that the MHPS was composed of three factors: Academic, Self-Regulatory, and Approval-Seeking. From this adequate level of measurement invariance, we further examined the latent mean difference across gender for the entire sample. Our findings showed no statistically significant mean differences in Academic, Self-Regulatory, and Approval-Seeking across gender. In addition, the HMPS was found to have adequate alpha reliability coefficients and omega coefficients. Concerning the validity evidence of the MHPS, Academic, Self-Regulatory, and Approval-Seeking purposes were positively correlated with homework effort, homework completion, and math achievement. The present study provides solid evidence that the MHPS is a reliable and valid measurement of math homework purposes.

Homework self-regulation strategies: a gender and educational-level invariance analysis

This study investigates the measurement invariance as a function of gender and educational level of the Homework Behavior Questionnaire (Ktpc), an instrument developed to assess students' homework self-regulation strategies. A sample of 1400 elementary and middle school students was used. Results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit of the theoretical model composed of three dimensions: planning, execution and evaluation of the homework completion. The results also provided evidence for the existence of metric invariance and partial scalar measurement invariance across boys and girls and across the elementary school and the middle school students. The reliability of the scores in the three dimensions was high. Girls obtained higher scores than boys in planning, execution and evaluation. Middle school students had lower scores in planning compared to the elementary school students. These findings are discussed, and their implications for practice are highlighted.