More from the race to nowhere...

[Periwinkle]

<p>I usually don’t agree with Valerie Strauss.</p>

<p>And I’m not changing that trend now.</p>

<p>It would have been helpful if she had given more information about the British study which found a positive result from homework. That would have contradicted her argument, though. The Australian study doesn’t prove anything. I haven’t read the study–but in this case, I don’t have to.</p>

<p>

Dr Ben Edwards, manager of the AIFS’s study of 10,000 children, said a small portion of children did more than seven hours homework a week but that could be attributed to extracurricular studies such as music classes.</p>

<p>While the majority of 10 and 11-year-olds - 59 per cent - do less than two hours of homework per week, 22 per cent do three or four hours a week. Five per cent do seven or more hours a week.

</p>

<p>Two hours of homework a week works out to seventeen minutes a day. Four hours a week is about half an hour. Only five percent of middle schoolers in Australia have an hour a day of homework. I’d guess that they attend private schools, and thus any gains from the school could be ascribed to socioeconomic status.</p>

<p>At any rate, perhaps the Australian study showed “no benefit” because the students weren’t doing enough homework to make a difference. The rule of thumb of 10 minutes per grade level would have 10-11 year olds doing 50 minutes of homework per school night, which would place them near the top of the Australian distribution.</p>