In a recent conversation about the effectiveness of homework with one of my graduate students, I did a quick search of my site (my ePortfolio) to pull together and share what I have learned about homework over the years and realized that it had been quite a while that I had looked at the research on homework. I scanned a few academic databases and ran a Google scholar search which revealed that there was a small increase in activity from 2007 – 2009 which was shortly after Alfie Kohn (2006) had published The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing but not that much has been published since then. Unless there is some groundbreaking research that I have missed that overturns the research that has been conducted the past several decades there is still no support for the idea of assigning homework at any age. The following resources should provide a useful starting point for your own investigation:
Does Homework Improve Learning? (Chapter 2 of The Homework Myth)– If you don’t have time to read Kohn’s full book and just want the facts then this chapter points to the data and offers a useful summary. I still recommend reviewing Kohn’s full book to see what really should be done regarding homework.
Rethinking Homework – This short essay points to why homework doesn’t work and include 9 recommendations to do instead of assigning typical homework.
2014 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning? Part II of the report confirms that little has changed since 1987 and the report confirms that:
high stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, especially in elementary grades.
But Homework is Still the Norm
While Kohn takes a very hard stance against homework, the reality is that homework is still the norm despite the research. Therefore it is important to point to how homework can be conducted more effectively.
Ending the Homework Debate: Expert Advice on What Works – This post and site point to the fact that aspects of doing homework can be beneficial if one shifts the focus from piling on the work to helping learners learn how to learn. The benefits of deepened understanding, critical thinking skills and developing discipline can be realized if homework focuses on paced repetition, retrieval practice, desirable difficulties, and deliberate practice.
The Scientific America article What Works, What Doesn’t points to the five key practices will help a student do well on the test. These practices include :
- Self Testing – Quizzing yourself gets you high marks
- Distributed Practice – For best results spread your study over time
- Elaborate Interrogation – Channel your inner four-year-old
- Self Explanation – How do I know
- Interleaved Practice – Mixing apples and oranges.
The article also points to what doesn’t work which includes; highligting, rereading and several other practices which students, unfortunately, fall back on.
Preparing Students for Life not just for the Test
If we really want to help our students learn then we need to shift the focus from passing the test to preparing them for life.
This Will Make You Rethink Improving Student Achievement – John Hattie’s warns just because we can show some type of improvement in achievement that doesn’t mean that anything goes and that we should continue to do what we have always done in the classroom. On the contrary, Hattie points to his research that shows we need to focus on those things that will move student achieve beyond the average effect size. We need to do those things that will help our students learn the most like formative feedback from a trusted mentor and visible and mastery learning. We must also acknowledge that class sizes, rigor, and homework and so many other things which have a smaller than average impact on achievement should not be allowed to drive what we do in our schools.
Not Suited for School BUT Suited for Learning: Implications – This is a very personal post because it focuses on my older son’s experience with the system of education and how his focus on going till knows and being able to fully understand concepts before moving on is not compatible with the high stakes testing system that our children are conditioned to perform in starting at an early age.
The fundamental question we need to come back to is are we preparing our students for the test or for life? Ideally, we should be preparing them for life but the system of education and credentialing also require that we prepare them for both. The challenge is to do both well.
