IS education - An Empirical Study Of Individually Assigned Homework

There is a general agreement that homework plays an important role in students' learning. We argue that without examining and re-examining the potential benefits of homework assignments and whether they are achieved, we miss the opportunity to support students' learning. In this paper we describe an instructional tactic of individually assigned homework that promotes and strengthens individual learning processes. The method was originally developed to cope with the relatively high IS students' failing rate. We describe the study that accompanied the employment of this tactic in a Computer Architecture course and describe respective quantitative and qualitative results. For the first time ever no student failed the course and an increase in students' motivation and learning accountability was observed. We compare the results to a previous study we conducted using the same tactic and discuss the implication of our results for IS education.