ssia.
Have there been studies done, specifically, on the benefits of assigning homework to elementary and middle school children?
Is there even a correlation between whether children who do homework and any meaningful measure of achievement? Is there evidence that it, plainly, makes them more intelligent?
Because I’ve always thought of homework to be a drag, as most kids do, which is why I was thinking about this issue. Hence the questions.
It’s controversial: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/09.28/homework.html
http://www.nfer.ac.uk/research-areas/pims-data/summaries/hwk-review-of-studies-on-homework.cfm
You have a very good point – homework is not for everybody. However, it is the lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all way of making somebody remember something. If droning mindless repetition does not make you remember or learn, at least the idea is, nothing can. That does not mean that it’s a good or efficient way for everybody, or even a majority. I have personally not seen any studies on this particular subject, but in my experience academic studies of the learning process are next to useless. They often either intentionally or non-intentionally miss the point.
It’s understandable, and I’ve always perceived homework as a form of hazing, a painful meaningless initiation ritual that makes you value what you learn and what you achieve. I definitely know there are studies on the fact that ‘meaningless’ painful initiation makes individuals value the group membership that much more. If you’re interested I could dig that up.
Alfie Kohn claims that studies have shown no benefit whatsoever to homework before middle school. The Homework Myth is his analysis of the studies and his interpretation. On the same page, you will find links to other books that claim homework is either no help or downright harmful to younger children. So you might like to read those and see what they say.
You gotta define “homework”. The time spent in class might not be enough time to revue material expected to be covered in class. Homework includes reading assignments which are to be discussed in class the next day.
Homework as in, work given out by the teacher to do at home every night. It is then brought back in the next day and graded. Basically. All work, not just reading.
It depends on the subject. For many topics, one only really learns by doing.
This is particularly true of basics like reading and writing. You only get better with practice. And that’s what homework is: practice with evaluation to make sure you’re reinforcing correct practice and not erroneous practice.
Far too much emphasis is placed on “being gifted” in our schooling system (and I speak as someone who went through “gifted” programs as a child). No cites here, but IMHO, look under the hood of many “gifted” children and you will find 20% precociousness and 80% much-more-than-average practice time in academic skills, be it simply a child who “reads for pleasure” (and hence reads many times more books than required in school), who sits around thinking about logic or word puzzles for fun, or whose parents sends them to afterschool tutoring programs for additional instruction and drillwork.
On a similar note, my wife is a college math professor and often comments to me about seeing students who were “used to being the top of their HS class” with little effort at a point when they hit their first really difficult course with all-new-to-them concepts (typically Calculus or a Discrete Math course requiring epsilon-delta or inductive proofs) where they can’t just coast by on smarts. They often genuinely can’t understand why they’re only getting 70s on their exams “when I read all the material”, well duh, they didn’t do the homework where they would have practiced these new techniques with feedback.
Meanwhile the steady-B students from earlier course levels, who had to bust their butt to get the B, are still getting Bs.
I sort of understand what you are saying, but have to disagree to a point.
Homework IS for everybody, but the exact nature of the homework should not be. While I am a firm proponent of “learning by doing”, not all children (or adults) progress at the same level. Nothing was more frustrating to me as a child than coming to a new school in 1st grade, when I already knew how to read, and being forced to do A-B-C phonics drillwork. I was bored, I goofed off, didn’t even do or turn in the homework, and was labeled a “problem child” until they placed me in a more advanced group.
That doesn’t mean that I should not have been given homework to do because I already knew the stuff being assigned. It meant I should have been (and eventually was) given the same amount of homeWORK (mental force times distance, if you will) relative to my capability.