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Newsletter 12.11 No. 133
The Homework Dilemmas (plural)
Yes, there are many.
We've chosen just two of the dilemmas to look at:
- How much?
- How much help?
Both of these dilemmas came to the forefront with a news item on Fox News in April of 2011. The parents of two school children decided that the homework being given was both too time consuming and irrelevant. They convinced school authorities to agree to a "no homework contract" with their family: in essence, the school will not grade or punish their children for incomplete or undone homework. They had two arguments:
- The school cannot know how much help students are being given to complete the assignments
- The assignments have little or no educational value
The Huffington Post recently reported the homework debate in New Jersey. "Children in some New Jersey school districts may soon be living nearly every student's dream: No more homework on the weekends." The article summarizes research that seems to indicate homework, especially at the lower grade levels, has little or no academic value.
If one looks at some of the work done by Harris Cooper, a Duke University psychology professor who is considered one of the nation's leading researchers on homework, one learns he sees no positive correlation between lots of homework for students in the lower grades and their academic achievement. "Kids burn out," he said. "Homework for young students should be short" and "lead to success without much struggle." He does not, however, advocate the abolishing of all homework. Cooper is a proponent of the "10-minute rule," which suggests teachers add 10 minutes of homework each night as students progress from grade to grade. A fifth-grader, for example, might be assigned about 50 minutes of homework a night.
However, Cooper's work did lead him to conclude that "the research synthesis ... showed the positive correlation was much stronger for secondary students - those in grades 7 through 12 - than those in elementary school." But be careful, for "while it's clear that homework is a critical part of the learning process, too much homework can be counter-productive for students at all levels. Even for high school students, overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades," Cooper said.
This brings us to current events. On December 4, 2011 there was some talk on Wall Street of a little known company that was carving a niche for itself with these homework dilemmas. With so many parents upset by "too much homework," and so many students feeling "justified" in getting "help" (or simply cheat) with their homework, the new startup company Slader believes they have a way to monetize the situation. "Slader spent all last summer with a bunch of math nerds, developing step-by-step solutions to most of the math problems in most of the high school math books used in this country (USA) - at last count, that's about a million solutions in 275 textbooks. Slader users, who are a mix of math students and the parents tasked with homework help, log in to the Web-based service and spend "points" to see the fully-formed solutions, and, hopefully, to learn something as well."
For the past decade or so educators have had to deal with the fact that "the internet" held many, if not most, of the answers to homework questions. Math teachers could chuckle when they added the "show your work" phrase to the assignment. Slader shows the work. Math teachers now join the ranks of English teachers and Social Studies teachers who struggle to discover the amount of plagiarism in students' work.
Many of those math teachers will check out Slader's website and cringe.
At Advantage Press we're pretty old school. Can homework motivate students to do better? We think so. Should homework be creative enough to promote interest and enthusiasm? We think so. Should homework be meaningful? Yes. Can homework improve student performance and behavior? Yes.
Imagine a homework assignment where student improvement is correlated with parental help on that assignment: The more help he or she received, the more improvement school would see. Pipe dream? We think not. Our Behavior Improvement Learning Packets and Motivation Packets and Bully Packets all can work even better with increased parental involvement at home. Try a free sample, send it home as "homework" and see for yourself.
Advantage Press provides Learning Packets for students to read, think about and write answers to questions. The packets are designed around specific school problems. Rules are clearly spelled out. Anecdotes are provided to place those rules into a simulated context. The packets work to guide students to set goals for their future behavior.
These packets are available in sets by grade level and topic at AdvantagePress.com and by individual packet download at LearningPackets.com.