So- eliminate homework and force all learning to occur during the school day. Create a shift worker mentality- turn brain on during school hours and off outside the school day. Slow the educational process so every student can master everything during the few hours in the classroom. Force all learning to be in group settings. Force those who get it in one to be bored while the teacher expounds on the subject enough so all students get it.
Do adults in professions turn off their work brains when they leave the workplace at the designated closing time? Do teachers only do work related things at school during their designated work hours? It is only low end shift work that occurs in time clock hours. We are not preparing students for the real world if they do not have homework.
In the ideal world students do not have to do busywork if they can show mastery via tests et al. However, too many students who should be doing homework skip it instead of learning the concepts. Hence requiring it instead of trusting a student to know when they really know the material. Son got B’s in AP stats and 100%s on tests because he did zero homework. But- I can see why the teacher made sure students did the work as it could be easy to assume one knew how to do the problems and flub the test. Son was the exception- gifted.
American schools are structured with plenty of time outside the classroom for homework. Teachers can’t cover enough material if they are restricted to the hours in the classroom. Forcing students to have a study hall takes away from learning opportunities and can be difficult situations for doing work.
I wonder what those parents are doing with their children’s out of school time. Is dance, music, sports, shopping, video games more important than their children having mastery of school subjects??? I like the thought of spending hours on something instead of the regimented class periods. Perhaps these parents need to find a school that is in session 10 hours per day- and be willing to pay for the time costs.
btw- how many HS students need to be told how college involves few hours in class but many independent hours to do the required work? Do these parents expect zero initiative from their children- all learning spoon fed in the classroom?
In response to twoin’s post… while I don’t agree with allowing students to repeatedly take tests, what is the point for taking points off for the other things?
My Catholic school was the same way. I got points off for my poor handwriting and other stupid things. I once got a zero on my homework because I was doing it during recess (we’ll ignore the fact that I did homework because I was relentlessly bullied and it was a way to stay away from the bullies). I’ve never understood taking points off for things like that.
And no, it didn’t encourage me to do better. It encouraged me to hate my school…
I don’t have a problem with homework, but like many others have said, I have a problem with busy work. If you can demonstrate that you know your times tables (for example) then why make those kids do worksheets with 100 multiplication drills on them? Furthermore, forcing us to do “creative” components to our work made me not want to do them at all. I am not a creative person and it was the most dreaded part of any assignment. Yet, I recognize that some people are creative and they should have the option to show that creativity in assignments.
Isn’t there some thinking in the education field right now that a longer school day is greatly beneficial, which has the side benefit of not needing so much homework in the mix?
At my high school in order to get an A in Honors Algebra 2 all you have to do is get an 80% on tests and quizzes. That’s crazy! Your grade is intended to show comprehension, and by having a misleading figure you’re misleading kids. In history this past week I’ve done 8 worksheets and 2 pages of vocabulary, and then I finished the test of 30 questions in literally 2 minutes. Theres a bit of a discrepancy right there. It’s almost as bad as teachers who grade for organization; organization is not comprehension in not a single way. I have my work disheveled in in my binders but because it’s not “organized” I went from having a 99% to a 94%. The lowest test/quiz grade that I have received was a 105% - but organization is important guys. The vocabulary she says is intended to help us study for quizzes and tests, yet the due date is two or three days prior to the test/quiz.
Agree that penalizing someone for doing homework during recess or during a free period during school hours is stupid. As for penalties for poor handwriting, that’s partially Catholic school tradition and that was derived from past notions that part of exhibiting one is a cultivated educated person is to demonstrate impeccable handwriting. Not saying I agree with it as I was dinged for bad handwriting while attending Catholic elementary school. Penmanship was probably my worst subject in those years.
It’s also not a past notion limited to Catholic Schools or old-school educational notions in the US/Europe.
During the days of the Chinese imperial civil service exams, one was graded in a manner for good handwriting. If one’s handwriting on the civil service exam is considered to be less than impeccable or there’s something off like an errant ink smudge*, the examiners wouldn’t bother to examine the contents of the exam before flunking the entire exam and the aspiring scholar-official. The gatekeepers within the Chinese imperial establishment were of the mind that if one demonstrated sloppy handwriting or turned in something with slight messes like an ink smudge even if it was due to inclement weather, that it demonstrated one wasn’t cultivated and educated to the standards they expected back then.
Not an uncommon occurrence considering one had to create one's own ink using a dried inkstone and water and the exam took around 3 days in examination stalls open to the elements. And there were no cancellations for bad weather. Examinees were expected to make preparations for all eventualities without excuses.
Homework should be there to show mastery and reinforce learning, but more often than not, it ends up being just busywork or silly arts-and-crafts type projects. Also, we need to get rid of school-day “fluff” (e.g., pep rallies, homecoming and school spirit nonsense). Students need more - rather than fewer - opportunities for real learning during the school day.
I’m not sure how I feel about “flipped” classrooms (where the kids watch lectures and/or videos at home and the classroom is used for working through problems with the help of the teacher). Done well, with dedicated teachers that engage with all of the students at their individual levels and are there to help them master concepts, it is a model that can work for some subjects, particularly in science and math. In other subjects (humanities, for example), having smaller, seminar-style classes wherein all of the students are expected to contribute to discussions, it becomes patently obvious whether or not students are doing the readings and are able to participate.
One solution would be to have a longer school day - with NO homework; another would be to have a longer school year or have school for 6 days a week rather than 5 days, again with NO homework, A longer school day will never happen because of sport practices and games; the latter two possibilities will never happen because nobody wants to lose their weekends or summer vacations.
Research clearly shows that homework has no positive effect in grade school, some in middle school, and somewhat more in high school. And there are cases like Finland where the schools vastly outperform U.S. schools with little to no homework at all. Schools have our kids for seven plus hours; that is time enough to learn a day’s worth of work without having to do more at home. Evening time should be for family, recreation, relaxation.
Finland has a vastly different poverty rate than the US. The US just passed 51% of kids eligible for free and reduced lunch. Finland has the second lowest relative poverty rate for children in the world at 5.3 percent, according to UNICEF.
Movements to have kids in school for longer than seven hours and year round (but with breaks spaced throughout the year) are largely focused on inner city or similarly poor areas. Many of such schools are charters.
IMO homework is useful for the most part. It should strengthen things learned during school. What some consider busy work (do they really need to color things on their paper?) other students gleefully do because that’s what tickles their personality. I also think some of it is giving chances to the not so smart kid who needs some points to pass. There is something to be said about a persistent student. They may do better in their career than the quicker student because they carry things through.
I agree that homework has benefit, particularly as grade levels increase. There probably should be a fairly smooth slope from little or no homework in the earliest grades to the levels of out-of-class work (not necessarily “homework”) required in college. Certainly, time spent in recreational reading in elementary school is valuable.
A related, but not identical, movement is project-based learning (or whatever they want to call it; there is disagreement). For an example, see the trailer at http://mltsfilm.org/
My son is in a 4-year engineering program at his school that used a similar project-based learning strategy to that shown in the trailer (but only for that class, not for the whole school day). The engineering class has little homework. There’s some homework in their physics rotation, but for the other rotations, it’s tough to bring the lathe, mill, soldering setup, CAD software, etc. home to do homework. The idea is that projects need to be finished by the end of grading periods, but more artificial grading periods are creeping back in.
Regarding “flipped” classrooms. My son did have that for Algebra II/Trig. His teacher was pretty good at creating lectures (and has now moved to some district-wide technology position). DS thought that being able to do the homework in class after having watched the video at home was a better strategy for kids who would have difficulty translating the lecture to actual practice if doing the homework at home. He didn’t feel that it made a difference one way or the other for him, since he didn’t find the material challenging. I think he did like that math homework only took the 15 minutes or so to watch the video and take notes.
I suppose APUSH is also “flipped” somewhat because the students take notes on a chapter prior to discussing the chapter in class. I think that helps make the class more interactive and less dependent on lecture and testing only.
@snarltron, I think you would have to read the original papers to draw any conclusions. For elementary school students, “the average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement … hovered around zero,” or no relationship. This may be because younger students have less-developed study habits and are less able to tune out distractions at home, Cooper says. I would say, this may be because the better students complete the homework faster and then go into school and perform better while having spent less time doing homework.
Kids have to practice reading to do well in school. And they have to learn their math facts to do well in school. It’s crippling at higher grade levels if they don’t read fluently and if they don’t know basic arithmetic. Either this can happen as homework, or it can happen in school, taking away instructional time for routine practice/drill. I would like to hope that more goes on in a good classroom than just drilling math facts or reading silently. If a teacher can’t assign useful homework, I would question whether much of value is going on in the classroom either.
^^^ Agree 100% - My kids are read to and read on their own and that is important. That is different from reading homework. Stunts like assigned “reading logs” can snuff out the enjoyment of reading.
I think the rise in homework and the attendant stress is in part profit based. Educational companies (and magazines like USNWR) getting public/private school administrators, parents, teachers, students, etc to drink the Kool Aid of rushing to buy newer and newer textbooks and their companion worksheets/supplements, buying supplemental workbooks or prep test books, enrolling in AP courses/ tests, etc, etc,etc, feeding on the fear of being left behind. (Post #5 “Competition is global,” very scary yeah?). And with the middle class disappearing, can you blame people for stressing out and succumbing to this fear? And is it a surprise there is backlash? Alternatively, if for whatever reason, schools, teachers, parents, students aren’t in rat race cycle above, students may turn to for profit colleges which can have its own set of problems. I don’t have a solution, just venting. Homework has value but not to the level of stress that I see here on CC.
“My kids are read to and read on their own and that is important. That is different from reading homework. Stunts like assigned “reading logs” can snuff out the enjoyment of reading.” Most kids these days, even honor students, read little to nothing on their own. If it’s assigned, there is a better chance it will happen. I know lots of kids who read only what the school requires of them.
I understand that homework has gotten more challenging for top students, and standardized tests do show more high scores than they used to. There are also increasing numbers of APs.
However, scores for average students are going nowhere. I really don’t believe that the average student with a 20 ACT in high school was really overloaded with homework at any point.
I would certainly like to see schools do a better job overseeing what teachers assign for homework, and focus elementary homework on value added English and math. I am sure we would all like to be rid of the busy work. However, the English and math are critical.
The suggestion that English and math homework does not benefit students is just obviously wrong. It can’t be true that more reading and math practice is not beneficial.
I can tell you what will happen if you stop assigning homework. The same thing that happens in the summer. The more educated and higher income parents are more likely to give their kids assignments and involve them in more activities that support education and development. Those students progress while the rest of the students lose ground, and the gap between the top and bottom students grows wider. Then everyone wonders why the students in low income and uneducated families are getting further behind.