The homework debate

Here's what the research kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in texas went viral last week, earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. A massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. New york city public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by duke university psychology professor harris cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and ’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children.

The great homework debate

At the end of his analysis, cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of e the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no all education experts agree entirely with cooper’s vatterott, an education professor at the university of missouri-st. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school. The author of rethinking homework: best practices that support diverse needs, thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids. I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary issue has been debated for decades. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework. Acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned. A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. 9 based on 1253 d on jul 29, school day brings something new, but there is one status quo most parents expect: homework.

But, while hunkering down after dinner among books and worksheets might seem like a natural part of childhood, there's more research now than ever suggesting that it shouldn't be ad in the education field today are looking for evidence to support the case for homework, but are coming up empty-handed. In his book the homework myth, kohn points out that no study has ever found a correlation between homework and academic achievement in elementary school, and there is little reason to believe that homework is necessary in high school. In fact, it may even diminish interest in learning, says you've ever had a late night argument with your child about completing homework, you probably know first-hand that homework can be a strain on families. In an effort to reduce that stress, a growing number of schools are banning jane cera is the academic administrator for the kino school, a private, nonprofit k-12 school in tucson, arizona, which maintains a no-homework policy across all grades. Cera says that when new students are told there will be no homework assignments, they breathe a sigh of proponents of homework argue that life is filled with things we don't like to do, and that homework teaches self-discipline, time management and other nonacademic life skills. Kohn challenges this popular notion: if kids have no choice in the matter of homework, they're not really exercising judgment, and are instead losing their sense of the kino school, cera says children often choose to take their favorite parts of school home. Anecdotal information from kino graduates suggests that the early control over their education continues to serve them well into college; they feel better equipped to manage their time and approach professors with of the reasons that we continue to dole out mountains of homework, kohn says, is our obsession with standardized tests. If we can agree on the importance of kids doing better on tests like pisa, kohn says, there is no research to suggest that homework is our ticket to success. Our “competitors” in the global marketplace are coming up with the same conclusions about homework.

The national parent teacher association suggests children in kindergarten through second grade should do homework for no more than 10 to 20 minutes a day, and for third through sixth graders the limit is 30-60 minutes a day. Some of this stuff isn't worth two minutes of their children's time,” he believes that the “default” setting for schools should be no homework, but that if evening work was assigned on occasion, it better be for a good reason. Parents who want to probe deeper into the quality of homework their child is getting, kohn says the first step is to check the school's policy. In the case where poorly designed homework is being given, it's time to talk to the teacher, sit down with the principal, write a letter to the editor, and/or speak up at the next school board meeting. The homework debate goes next, be it the front pages or on the back burner, it's worth taking a moment to examine if we're asking the right questions about our children's education. The media coverage of the debate often zeroes in on these two seemingly polar opposite views, even though they may not be all that far apart. Harris cooper, professor of psychology and neuroscience at duke university, resulting in undue stress for students, aggravation for parents and no academic  as cooper, author of “the battle over homework: common ground for administrators, teachers, and parents,” recently told nea today, homework levels and parental attitudes haven’t really changed dramatically over the years. S a lot of focus on homework now, but has it been scrutinized so heavily in the past? You can go back to world war i or a little after, when it was considered important for kids to exercise their brain like a muscle and that homework was a way to do that.

In the 1950s, people were worried about falling behind the communists, so more homework was needed as a way to speed up our education and technology. During the 1960s, homework fell out of favor because many though it inflicted too much stress on kids. In the 1970s and 1980s, we needed more homework to keep up with the japanese economically. More recently, as everything about education and teachers is being scrutinized, homework has come into question ’s interesting is that the actual percentage of people who support or oppose homework has changed very little over the years. And the actual amount of homework kids are doing has changed very little over the last 65 haven’t we seen an uptick in the amount of homework assigned to elementary students? So you’ll find some people who say the amount of homework being given to 2nd graders, for example, has increased 50 percent. So this has led to more reading most high school students are still doing approximately the same amount of homework on average, there’s a great deal of variation. So there are a lot of kids out there taking four or five advanced placement and honors classes now, which might not have been the case a while ing to the metlife foundation national homework survey, 3 out of 5 parents said their kids are getting just the right amount of homework. That survey is a few years old now but i doubt that’s ’ve concluded that homework generally can improve student achievement.

They show that kids who did the homework performed  we’re really talking about correlation here, so we have to be a little careful. It’s also worth noting that these correlations with older students are likely caused, not only by homework helping achievement, but also by kids who have higher achievement levels doing more at a particular point more homework is not a good thing. Nobody has a policy that says you can expect your second-graders to bring home two hours of homework. So we really need more work on subject matter, on homework quality, on the level of inquisitiveness that it engenders and the way it motivates. Also we need to know more about the use of the internet, especially as it relates to potential disparities between rich and poor and the ability to research at schools be done with homework? For example, when the child is doing math homework, a parent could balance the checkbook to demonstrate how the skill can be used in adult life, or they can they read their own book while their child is rk also keeps parents aware of what their child is learning. The parents don’t necessarily see it until they see their child work on homework is going to have its intended affects, teachers should ask parents to take part less often as kids get older. If support from parents is withdrawn slowly, it can promote autonomous learning – teaching kids that they can learn on their own and they can learn you think overall the current debate or controversy over homework has been helpful and what, if anything, should educators take from it? Well, i recognize that the debate will always be there, but i generally choose to ignore it, or at least the people who, as the old saying goes, use science the same way a drunkard uses a lamp post – more for support than for rk is probably the most complicated pedagogical strategy teachers use because it’s open to variations due to child individual differences and the home context.

They’re not going to satisfy everyone, because kids take homework home to different environments and to parents with different expectations. But, like i said before, three in five parents are satisfied and there’s one in each direction – too much homework or too little. That probably means teachers are doing their job : associated rs and their classrooms: parental involvement, trends in curriculumeducation policy: student achievementpost tags: 10-minute rule homework, do kids have too much homework? Assign homework every night but i do not in any way include it in the student’s grade for many of the reasons listed above. I do “spot check” to see if they have done the work and enter this into our online grading system under a “0%” heading just so parents can have an idea if their students are doing the homework. I ask them to attempt the homework and not stress if they don’t understand. For my esl classes, i’ve found that homework is a way to generate discussion questions in class! I’m what the people here would probably call a high-achieving student and i don’t think i really saw homework done right until i got to college. The reason why is simple: the homework we get in the upper-level engineering classes is so hard that anyone with any sense does it in a group.

14, 2017 • mary ellen the money: the school-to-(privatized)-prison and technical core state childhood student succeeds education and college and civil /international t health and r recruitment and an education ion support ty community annual meeting and representative your hand lized instructional support r appreciation ts and social h-language ation/dream -to-prison ts with rs and their orating with ors in the sional t learning logy in the ing » education trends, school life » the great homework great homework s and educators disagree about the right amount of homework for elementary school students — and even whether it should be assigned at : christina tynan-wood | september 29, first grader is in the middle of a tea party with six of her stuffed animals. You are enjoying eavesdropping on the dialogue as you clean up the dinner dishes, but it’s time for homework. The debate over homework has been going on for decades, with the pendulum swinging back and forth between more and less homework for american students. Adding new fuel to the debate is that today’s kids are getting more homework in earlier grades. The amount of homework that younger kids – ages 6 to 9 – have to do has gone up astronomically since the late ’80s,” says alfie kohn, author of the 2006 book the homework myth: why our kids get too much of a bad rk detractors point to research that shows homework has no demonstrated benefits for students in the early elementary grades. They say younger students are not developmentally ready to learn the time management and work habits that nightly homework is assumed to teach, and that having grades depend on homework penalizes low-income students who may not have the resources at home to support nightly study sessions. On the pro-homework side are educators and parents who say that homework is necessary for reinforcing the lessons learned during the school day and that doing homework prepares kids for the work they’ll have in middle school, high school, and college. He argues that homework in the elementary school years is more likely to drive students away from learning than to improve academic outcomes. What’s more, he says, time spent on homework is time not spent doing important activities like play, rest, and family time.

The research clearly shows that there is no correlation between academic achievement and homework, especially in the lower grades,” says denise pope, senior lecturer at the stanford university graduate school of education and the author of the 2015 book, overloaded and underprepared: strategies for stronger schools and healthy successful kids. Advertisement “homework only really helps in high school,” agrees heather shumaker, author of it’s ok to go up the slide. Gaithersburg elementary school in maryland issued a ban on homework in 2012, asking students to read at home each evening instead. 116 sent home a letter to parents explaining why students would not be assigned any homework. It is very difficult to know what schools are doing,” says gerald le tendre, head of education policy studies at pennsylvania state university and co-author of promoting and sustaining a quality teacher pro-homework campparents are among the most vocal detractors of banning or reducing homework in the elementary school grades. If you have a highly motivated kid who loves mathematics and loves spending hours every night on kahn academy, they can get substantial benefit from doing homework,” says le s show that homework has positive effects for certain students under certain conditions. For example, students with learning disabilities can benefit from homework if they have the support they need to complete it. Middle and high school students benefit from doing homework, though high school students get more benefit more than middle schoolers, and more homework definitely isn’t better — too much homework (more than about an hour and a half a night for middle schoolers and more than two and a half hours for high schoolers) has been shown to negatively affect academic performance. And if the assigned homework is to spend time reading for pleasure, no one is likely to argue with that.

In praise of purposeful homeworkpoints and counterpoints aside, elementary school homework is probably not going to disappear any time soon. The national pta’s research-based recommendation is ten to twenty minutes of homework a night in first grade and an additional ten minutes per grade level thereafter. The teacher can’t know that homework is a tear-filled, hours-long event that is making your child dread school if you don’t tell her. Work with the teacher to make sure that the homework your child receives is appropriate for them. Homework should be challenging enough to be thought-provoking, rather than just busy work, and your child should be able to complete it independently and successfully most of the sure you understand the teacher’s goal for assigning homework. When homework is purposeful and assigned in an amount and at a difficulty level that is appropriate for your child, it will likely be easier to incorporate into your home life — and less likely to negatively affect your child’s attitude toward happily, if your child’s homework is to read for pleasure, you won’t have to ask her to put away her toys and sit down to a worksheet. M interested in grades:Parenting » education trends, school life » the great homework great homework s and educators disagree about the right amount of homework for elementary school students — and even whether it should be assigned at : christina tynan-wood | september 29, first grader is in the middle of a tea party with six of her stuffed animals.