Abstract
The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of homework on junior secondary school students’ mathematics achievement in Kokona LGA, Nasarawa State. Home background in terms of literate and illiterate parents was employed as moderator. Two research questions were answered and hypotheses were tested. A sample of 73 junior secondary school students from two schools (38 students in experimental group and 35 in control group) were selected. Purposive sampling was adopted to select schools and classes that have students from both literate and illiterate parents; Quasi experimental design of pre-test and post-test match group was adopted. Mathematics Achievement test was used as instrument. The instrument was validated by two experts and a logical validity index of 0.87 was obtained; also a pilot test of the instrument was carried out on 30 students and a reliability index of 0.79 was obtained using split-half method. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions and ANCOVA was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that students that were given homework performed better than their counterpart that were not given homework; also students from illiterate parent performed better than those from from literate parents and there is no significant difference between the mean achievement of students given homework and those were not given homework. The result of oral interview revealed that students from illiterate parents efforts do the assignment themselves most often or were been assisted/taught by others but students from literate parent often have their assignments done by their parent s and the only copy them with their writing. The researcher recommended that students should be made to work out answer to the questions on the board for others to see most often when assignments were given and parents should be enlightened at PTA meetings the need to teach their wards to do their assignments than have them done for the students.