Mar 13, · Books like The End of Homework, The Homework Myth, and The Case Against Homework and the film Race to Nowhere make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers Homework Help. Improve your study skills with these tips for time management, organization, and research. Resources are also available for parents looking to help their child focus Feb 19, · The author of the essay “The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help” in the winter issue of Education Next, Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies
Does Homework Improve Learning? - Alfie Kohn
You might think that open-minded people who review the evidence should be able to agree on whether homework really does help, does homework really help learning. Their assessments ranged from homework having positive effects, no effects, or complex effects to the suggestion that the research was too sparse or poorly conducted to allow trustworthy conclusions.
Fill-in-the-blank worksheets or extended projects? In what school subject s? How old are the students? How able and interested are they? Are we looking at how much the teacher assigned or at how much the kids actually did?
How careful was the study and how many students were investigated? Even when you take account of all these variables, the bottom line remains that no definite conclusion can be reached, and that is itself a significant conclusion. Research casting doubt on that assumption goes back at least towhen a study found that assigning spelling homework had no effect on how does homework really help learning children were at spelling later on.
About 70 percent of these found that homework was associated with higher achievement. As for more recent studies looking for a relationship between achievement and time spent on homework, the overall correlation was about the same as the one found in But if we look more closely, even that description turns out to be too generous. At best, most homework studies show only an association, not a causal relationship.
Nevertheless, most research purporting to show a positive effect of homework seems to be based on the assumption that when students who get or do more homework also score better on standardized tests, it follows that the higher scores were due to their having had more homework. There are almost always other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned — let alone why does homework really help learning students might take more time with their homework than their peers do.
or that better students simply spend more time on home study. Again, it would be erroneous to conclude that homework is responsible for higher achievement. Or that a complete absence of homework would have any detrimental effect at all.
One of the most frequently cited studies does homework really help learning the field was published in the early s by a researcher does homework really help learning Timothy Keith, who looked at survey results from tens of thousands of high school students and concluded that homework had a positive relationship to achievement, at least at that age. But a funny thing happened ten years later when he and a colleague looked at homework alongside other possible influences on learning such as quality of instruction, motivation, and which classes the students took.
Do we really know how much homework kids do? The studies claiming that homework helps are based on the assumption that we can accurately measure the number and length of assignments.
But many of these studies depend on students to tell us how much homework they get or complete. When Cooper and his associates looked at recent studies in which the time spent on homework was reported by students, and then compared them with studies in which that estimate was provided by their parents, the results were quite different.
uncorrelated with the student report. Homework studies confuse grades and test scores with learning, does homework really help learning. Each is seriously flawed in its own way. In the second kind of study, course grades does homework really help learning used to determine whether homework made a difference. Any given assignment may well be given two different grades by two equally qualified teachers — and may even be given two different grades by a single teacher who reads it at two different times.
The final course grade, moreover, is based on a combination of these individual marks, does homework really help learning, along with other, even less well defined considerations. The final grade a teacher chooses for a student will often be based at least partly on whether, does homework really help learning, and to what extent, that student did the homework.
Thus, to say that more homework is associated with better school performance as measured by grades is to provide no useful information about whether homework is intrinsically valuable.
Yet grades are the basis for a good number of the does homework really help learning that are cited to defend that very conclusion. The studies that use grades as the outcome measure, not surprisingly, tend to show a much stronger effect for homework than studies that use standardized test scores. Cooper and his colleagues conducted a study in with both younger and older does homework really help learning from grades 2 through 12using both grades and standardized test scores to measure achievement.
They also looked at how much homework was assigned by the teacher as well as at how much time students spent on their homework. Thus, there were eight separate results to be reported. The last, and most common, way of measuring achievement is to use standardized test scores. They are, however, excellent indicators of two things. The first is affluence: Up to 90 percent of the difference in scores among schools, communities, or even states can be accounted for, statistically speaking, without knowing anything about what happened inside the classrooms.
The second phenomenon that standardized tests measure is how skillful a particular group of students is at taking standardized tests — and, increasingly, how much class time has been given over to preparing them to do just that. In my experience, teachers can almost always identify several does homework really help learning who do poorly on standardized tests even though, by more authentic and meaningful indicators, they are extremely talented thinkers.
These anecdotal reports have been corroborated by research that finds a statistically significant positive relationship between a shallow or superficial approach to learning, on the one hand, and high scores on various standardized tests, on the other.
To that extent, students cannot really demonstrate what they know or what they can do with what they know. Multiple-choice tests are basically designed so that many kids who understand a given idea will be tricked into picking the wrong answer. Instead, its primary purpose is to artificially spread out the scores in order to facilitate ranking students against each other.
Moreover, the selection of questions for these tests is informed by this imperative to rank. Thus, items that a lot of students answer correctly or incorrectly are typically eliminated — regardless of whether the content is important — and replaced with questions that about half the kids will get right, does homework really help learning.
This is done in order to make it easier to compare students to one another. In the latter case, does homework really help learning, a high or rising average test score may actually be a reason to worry.
Every hour that teachers spend preparing kids to succeed on standardized tests, even if that investment pays off, is an hour not spent helping kids to become critical, curious, creative thinkers. The limitations of these tests are so numerous and so serious that studies showing an association between homework and higher scores are highly misleading.
The fact that more meaningful outcomes are hard to quantify does not make test scores or grades any more valid, reliable, or useful as measures. To use them anyway calls to mind the story of the man who looked for his lost keys near a streetlight one night not because that was where he dropped them but just because the light was better there.
Even taken on its own terms, the research turns up some findings that must give pause to anyone who thinks homework is valuable. Homework matters less the longer you look. The longer the duration of a homework study, the less of an effect the homework is shown to have.
Even where they do exist, positive effects are often quite small. The same was true of a large-scale high school study from the s. There is no evidence of any academic benefit from homework in elementary school. The absence of evidence supporting the value of homework before high school is generally acknowledged by experts in the field — even those who are far less critical of the research literature and less troubled by the negative effects of homework than I am.
But this remarkable fact is rarely communicated to the general public. It, too, found minuscule correlations between the amount of homework done by sixth graders, on the one hand, and their grades and test scores, does homework really help learning, on the other, does homework really help learning. For third graders, the correlations were negative : more homework was associated with lower achievement. He was kind enough to offer the citations, and I managed to track them down.
The point was to see whether children who did math homework would perform better on a quiz taken immediately afterward that covered exactly the same content as the homework. The third study tested 64 fifth graders on social studies facts.
All three of these experiments found exactly what you would expect: The kids who had drilled on the material — a process that happened to take place at home — did does homework really help learning on their respective class tests. The final study, a dissertation project, involved teaching a does homework really help learning contained in a language arts textbook. It seems safe to say that these latest four studies offer no reason to revise the earlier summary statement that no meaningful evidence exists of an academic advantage for children in elementary school who do homework.
The correlation only spikes at or above grade A large correlation is necessary, in other words, but not sufficient. Indeed, I believe it would be a mistake to conclude that homework is a meaningful contributor to learning even in high school. Remember that Cooper and his colleagues found a positive effect only when they looked at how much homework high school students actually did as opposed to how much the teacher assigned and only when achievement was measured by the grades given to them by those same teachers.
All of the cautions, qualifications, and criticisms in this chapter, for that matter, are relevant to students of all ages. Students who take this test also answer a series of questions about themselves, sometimes including how much time they spend on homework. For any number of reasons, one might expect to find a reasonably strong association between time spent on homework and test scores. Yet the most striking result, particularly for elementary students, is precisely the absence of such an association, does homework really help learning.
Consider the results of the math exam, does homework really help learning. Fourth graders who did no homework got roughly the same score as those who did 30 minutes a night. Remarkably, the scores then declined for those who did 45 minutes, then declined again for those who did an hour or more! In twelfth grade, the scores were about the same regardless of whether students did only 15 minutes or more than an hour.
In the s, year-olds in a dozen nations were tested and also queried about how much they studied. Again, the results were not the same in all countries, even when the focus was limited to the final years of high school where the contribution of homework is thought to be strongest. Usually it turned out that doing some homework had a stronger relationship with achievement than doing none at all, but doing a little homework was also does homework really help learning than doing a lot, does homework really help learning.
Again they came up empty handed. Premise 1: Our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the globe. Additional conclusion: If U. teachers assigned more homework, our students would perform better.
Every step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false. Premise 2 has been debunked by a number of analysts and for a number of different reasons. But in fact there is now empirical evidence, does homework really help learning, not just logic, to challenge the conclusions.
Two researchers looked at TIMSS data from both and in order to be able to compare practices in 50 countries. When they published their findings inthey could scarcely conceal their surprise:. Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships, [but] the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in the frequency, total amount, and percentage of teachers who used homework in grading are all negative!
If these data can be extrapolated to other subjects — a research topic that warrants immediate study, in our opinion — then countries that try to improve their standing in the world rankings of student achievement by raising the amount of homework might actually be undermining their own success.
More homework may actually undermine national achievement. Incidental research raises further doubts about homework.
Parents Try Doing Their Teen’s Homework
, time: 11:25The Case for (Quality) Homework - Education Next
Homework Help. Improve your study skills with these tips for time management, organization, and research. Resources are also available for parents looking to help their child focus Homework, or a homework assignment, is a set of tasks assigned to students by their teachers to be completed outside the blogger.com homework assignments may include required reading, a writing or typing project, mathematical exercises to be completed, information to be reviewed before a test, or other skills to be practiced.. The effects of homework are debated On the other hand, a study reporting a modest correlation between achievement test scores and the amount of math homework assigned also found that “repetitive exercises” of the type intended to help students practice skills actually “had detrimental effects on learning” (Trautwein et al., p. 41)
No comments:
Post a Comment