What Is Homework's Purpose in a Pandemic? What's the Right Amount of Homework? Many Students Get Too Little, Brief Argues - Teaching Now. Arguments against homework are well-documented, with some parents, teachers, and researchers saying these assignments put unnecessary stress on students and may not actually be helping them learn.
But a new article for the journal Education Next argues that many American students don't have too much homework—they have too little. Anxiety about overscheduled students with upwards of three or four hours of homework a night has overshadowed another problem, writes Janine Bempechat, a clinical professor of human development at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development: Low-income students aren't getting enough homework, and they may be suffering academically as a result. "Eliminating homework is probably not as big a problem for high-income kids, because they have parents who will expose them to what they may not be getting after school," Bempechat said in an interview with Education Week.
Some students may be receiving even less than that. Image: Getty. The role of “practice” in mathematics class. A few weeks ago a NYTimes published an article titled, Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later, an opinion piece that, basically, asserts that girls would benefit from “extra required practice”.
I took a few minutes to look through the comments (which there are over 600) and noticed a polarizing set of personal comments related to what has worked or hasn’t worked for each person, or their own children. Some sharing how practicing was an essential component for making them/their kids successful at mathematics, and others discussing stories related to frustration, humiliation and the need for children to enjoy and be interested in the subject. To many, the term “practice” brings about childhood memories of completing pages of repeated random questions, or drills sheets where the same algorithm is used over and over again.
Students who successfully completed the first few questions typically had no issues completing each and every question. What choice would you make??? Math Visuals. Designing Effective Homework - Achieve the Core Aligned Materials. Homework.
It can be challenging…and not just for students. For teachers, designing homework can be a daunting task with lots of unanswered questions: How much should I assign? What type of content should I cover? Why aren’t students doing the work I assign? Homework can be a powerful opportunity to reinforce the Shifts in your instruction and promote standards-aligned learning, but how do we avoid the pitfalls that make key learning opportunities sources of stress and antipathy? The nonprofit Instruction Partners recently set out to answer some of these questions, looking at what research says about what works when it comes to homework.
Does homework help? Consistent homework completion has been shown to increase student achievement rates—but frequency matters. What should homework cover? In grades 1–5, homework should: Reinforce and allow students to practice skills learned in the classroomHelp students develop good study habits and routinesFoster positive feelings about school. The Risks of Guesstimating Homework Time. It is often said that a sign of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting different results each time. This sums up how most American schools are dealing with the homework issue. Not only does homework impact students but it also impacts their families. It is common for students and families to feel that they don’t have the time it takes to maintain a healthy balance between work and the rest of their lives.
Family time that could be spent getting outdoors, visiting friends and relatives, and relaxing is being unnecessarily burdened by the large amount of homework kids have to do. One student’s homework has the power to reshape how the entire family spends its time and sets its schedules. Guesstimating Pitfalls Despite studies -- such as this one from Stanford -- that show homework is ineffective beyond a certain amount per night, teachers and administrators continue to assign too much homework.
Valuing Free Time. Edutopia. If you’re assigning the same homework to all of your students, you may not be helping them reach their full potential. Consider this scenario: Marly and Evan are in the same math class, but they’re having very different experiences with homework. Marly completes most of her work in a few minutes. After all, she already knows how to divide fractions.
Evan, however, spends an hour and a half struggling through work he doesn’t understand. After several meltdowns (by both Evan and his mother), he finishes. This scene is, of course, nothing new. Fortunately, there’s a way we can offer students more appropriately differentiated learning tasks for homework while not crushing ourselves with work.