What's the use of homework? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    I hesitated to report this but after a second thought decided to do so simply because it is one of the most debated issues in education. Homework, that is. In my experience there are few things about school that students dislike more than they do homework. And parents to boot. But it's something that has seemingly been around as long as schools have been.

    Now an Australian (not sure what difference that makes) study has found that homework has little value. More specifically the authors of the study report that it has the least benefit in the early grades, only slight benefits in middle grades and some benefit at the high school level. I would have thought the reverse.

    Click here to read the UK Telegraph story.

    I said at the start that I hesitated to post this report. It is an example of what is often wrong about the way the media reports academic research. They don't give you the original data. Even a search of the Australian Institute of Family Studies' website, the publisher of the study, did not disclose the report of the original study. Nonetheless, the issue of homework, and more specifically, its value, is an important one.

    In my experience as both a parent, school principal and superintendent, I have found that homework is not necessarily good or bad but rather it is some of both. Like so many things in education it depends on how its used.

    Homework can be a good experience if it becomes a comfortable way for a parent to spend time with the child. But the problem often is that by about the third or fourth grade the child begins to try to "cut the apron strings" and homework turns into a struggle between the parent and child. That's a bad thing.

    But if doing homework reduces the amount of time the child spends playing mindless video games or watching TV, that is a good thing.

    But those kinds of issues are only incidental to the main issue. The major issue is, or should be, whether homework enhances learning. That is where the report of this study is informative. I have always had my doubts about the benefit of homework, especially when it was repetitious of what was done at school. We've all seen that. The teacher introduces a concept/skill etc. She offers some examples, often called "guided practice." She then makes an assignment to do more of what she has just demonstrated. If the students do not finish within the allotted time, they are told to finish it at home.

    The irony of this approach is that the kids who know the concept usually finish and thus have no homework. If the teacher is the kind who then adds more "work" for those who finished in class they soon figure out that it is not smart to finish too soon. But for the kids that couldn't do the assignment as "seat work" they are assigned to struggle with something they don't know how to do, just more of it with less help. If they "get it wrong" on their homework it hurts their grade in addition to usually causing a fight between child and parent.

    So homework tends to become punishment. Then, if the amount of homework assigned takes very much time to complete, it becomes yet another problem for both student and parent. My experience as a parent is that for young children not much learning takes place after about thirty minutes of "working on homework." Teachers who load students down with more homework than that are neither producing much learning nor fostering good work habits.

    So it seems to me that the real issue is the quality of the homework assignments. Good teachers pay careful attention to that. They learn what works and what does not work and they adjust their assignments to both the material being taught and the response of the students. Unfortunately, poor teachers just usually punish "failure" of not doing the homework, or doing it correctly and even worse, add more to it. So homework does not help the weaker student, it only compounds failure.

    One of the things, as a principal, I used to watch for in classroom observations was how the teacher checked and reviewed the homework. The worst sin was when the students would be asked to "take out your homework" and the teacher walked around the room, looked at the documents and made a check or "X" mark in the gradebook. He/she was simply checking to see that something had been done. But that does not tell the teacher whether the student learned anything or not.

    The best use of homework I observed was when the teacher sent home a sheet that showed a specific skill the class was being taught and the level of competence that child had exhibited on that skill. Then the "homework sheet" listed some things the parent could do to help the child master that skill. Kids quickly learned that the way to "get out of homework" was to master the skill quickly...and then you could go outside and play (or, heaven forbid, get on your video game or phone).

    But the age old fallacy of "homework" is that it is often the parent upon whom the quality of the homework experience depends. And my problem with that was that after kids get beyond about the fifth or sixth grade many parents (that includes me) can't help the kid very much, particularly if it is math or science.

    But back to the study...I suspect that this study's finding that "homework produces little achievement," does not factor in the "chicken and the egg" issue. That is, good students do their homework better simply because they already know the material rather than it being that they learn the material by doing the homework.

    So what's the use?

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.